
COEmiGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE TEACHER'S IDEALS 

OF 

LIFE AND HAPPINESS 



BY 



WILLIAM HENRY PYLE 



THE 

MISSOURI BOOK COMPANY 

COLUMBIA, MISSOURI 

1920 






COPYRIGHTED, 1920 

BY 
THE MISSOURI BOOK COMPANY 



©CI.A570778 



*T>. 



"For that day a large wisdom came to me. 
There was a great light, and I saw clear, and 
I knew that it was not for money that a man 
must live, but for a happiness that no man can 
give, or buy, or sell, and that is beyond all 
value of all the money in the world." — Jack 
London. 



PREFACE 

The aim of this little book is to help my fel- 
low teachers to think deeply about the serious as- 
pects of human life. After spending tweuty-iive 
years of my life as a teacher, I have reached the 
conviction that what teachers most need is not 
more theory or more method, but a wider out- 
look, a clearer vision, and deeper convictions 
concerning matters of great importance to the 
lives of the children which the}^ try to influ- 
ence. 

I have written as simply, as plainly, and as 
briefly as I could. I have not the least doubt 
about the truth or the importance of the prin- 
ciples which I have tried to emphasize. If these 
chapters, through the teachers who may read 
them, contribute in ever so small a way toward 
a larger life and greater possibilities and op- 
portunities for children, I shall be happy. 

The selections from Emerson and Bryant in 
Chapter III are printed with the permission of, 
and by special arrangement with, Houghton 
Mifflin Co., and D. Appleton and Co. 
I'niversity of Missouri W. H. P. 

(vii) 



CONTENTS. 

Chapter Page 

I. The Teacher's Philosophy of Life. 1 

II. Ideals of Literature 17 

III. Ideals op Nature 28 

IV. Ideals of Work 43 

V. Ideals of Play. . . . . . . .57 

YI. Ideals of Democracy 69 

VII. Ideals of Home and Children. . . 80 

VIII. Ideals of Art and Beauty. ... 88 

IX. Ideals of Morals and Religion. . . 98 



(IX) 



CHAPTER I 

THE TEACHER'S PHILOSO- 
PHY OF LIFE 

In a teachers' examination, questions are asked 
to determine the applicant's knowledge of geog- 
raphy, history, arithmetic, and the other sub- 
jects taught in school. No questions are asked 
to determine what kind of person the applicant 
is; no questions are asked to determine the 
teacher's philosophy of life. The fundamental, 
controlling principles of a teacher's life are of 
far more importance than her knowledge of the 
school subjects. Of course, a teacher should have 
a broad and thorough knowledge, for she is 
the leader of the children who are learning 
about the world and forming habits. But knowl- 
edge and habits are not ends in themselves, they 
are only means to an end. There is no intrin- 
sic virtue in arithmetic or grammar or reading 
or spelling or writing or any other bit of knowl- 
edge or skill. It is a blind and shortsighted 
view that considers school subjects as ends in 
themselves. 

(1) 



2 The Teacher's Ideals op Life. 

AVhat is the end which we hope our children 
may reach, at least in part, by pursuing certain 
courses of study? What kind of men and wo- 
men do we wish them to become? What am- 
bitions and aims and principles should guide 
their lives ? What kind of life should they live ? 
A teacher's position on these questions is of 
the highest importance. Whatever other quali- 
fications she may have, however learned she 
may be, she should not be a leader of children 
unless her principles of life are sound, unless 
she has the highest conception of the aims and 
purposes and meaning of life, of duty, of serv- 
ice, of loyalty, of love, and of home. 

Teachers should be of the highest type which 
our civilization affords. If a teacher is deficient 
in some branch of knowledge, hard and earnest 
study will soon make the deficiency good; but 
if she has reached maturity without having ac- 
quired a sound philosophy of life, this defect 
cannot be made good by a few nights or months 
of study. A correspondence course or a night 
school will give little help ; for a sound philoso- 
phy of life is not a matter of knowledge merely,, 
but a matter of ideals. Ideals are not things 
to be learned by rote, but are guiding principles 
to be incorporated into our being as the moving 
forces of our lives. A teacher skilled in knowl- 



The Teacher's Philosophy of Life. 3 

edge, but knowing not what the knowledge is 
for ; skilled in the arts of teaching, but knowing 
not why she teaches; knowing only immediate 
ends, but seeing not the higher purposes, has no 
right to be in a school room. 

What are the higher ends? What are the 
true aims of life ? Can we go to some wise man, 
ask him the meaning of life and get the true 
answer? No, there is no one answer to the 
question. There is no absolute aim or purpose 
of life. Each individual must answer for him- 
self. We find ourselves here; we are alive. 
What shall we do with our lives? We can do 
what we will. We can live one kind of life or 
another, just as we please. But what kind of 
life is best for us to live ? We have wants ; we 
have desires; we are always trying to s»itisfy 
them. Our life is spent in trying to get what 
we want. 

We must first of all supply the physical needs 
of our bodies. These wants are most pressing 
and must be constantly satisfied or we die. The 
primary aim of all education, therefore, as well 
as of all our efforts, must be to maintain physi- 
cal life. There can be no disagreement on this 
point. The training of school and of home 
should fit the child to make a living. But Jioiv 
is one to live? What is one to do with his life? 



4 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

One works to live, but what does one live for? 
This brings us again to the question, what should 
be our aim in life? After we have satisfied the 
physical needs of our bodies, what desires still 
remain? To make the question concrete, let us 
suppose a man's day^s work is done, he has had 
his supper, and it is several hours till bedtime, 
what shall he do ? He has desires which we may 
very well call spiritual. The man wishes to be 
happy. He does not wish to be unhappy. He 
will do what brings him happiness and not pain, 
or at least what he thinks will do it. The pos- 
sibilities are many. He can read books, listen 
to music, go to the theater, take a walk, smoke 
his pipe, play with his children, talk to a friend. 
What ought he to do? Again the answer mast 
come from the individual; there is no absolute 
answer. There is no one who can tell him Avhat 
he ought to do. Truly, there is no ought about 
it. 

The solution of the problem, however, is not 
hopeless. While the man whose day's work is 
done can find no one capable of telling him what 
he ought to do, by studying the lives of those 
about him, he can learn much concerning the 
outcome of any course that he may pursue. Let 
us, then, make such a study of the life about us, 
and the lives of those who have lived before us. 



The Teacher's Philosophy of Life. 5 

to see if we can reach any sound conclusion as 
to what course man should pursue to attain hap- 
piness. 

The question will at once be asked whether 
men should seek happiness, whether seeking hap- 
piness should be the aim of life. With such a 
question we have little concern. Whatever may 
be the aim of life, men wish to be happy ; and it 
is well that they know something of the condi- 
tions under which the highest happiness may be 
attained. There are those who say that mak- 
ing happiness the aim of life is hedonism, and 
seem to think that when they have given such 
a course the name of 'hedonism,' that condemns 
it forever. They say to us that to be happy 
we must not seek happiness directly; we must 
seek truth, or justice, or ideal values, then we 
shall be happy. Very well then, if we are to 
be happy through something else, we shall seek 
these other things ; but it is happiness after 
all that we want, and these other things are of 
importance to us only as they have a bearing on 
human happiness. Neither justice, nor truth, 
nor ideal values, nor anything else concerns us 
except as we think it will affect human happiness. 
No one but a fool would voluntarily and per- 
sistently pursue a course that he thinks would 
bring only pain. Every act of our lives is 



6 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

to escape pain of some kind or to attain pleasure 
of some kind. This, in spite of the empty words 
of philosophers, is the primal law of life. Any 
philosophy that is sound must be in accord with 
the laws of life. What, then, can we do to be 
happy ? 

The answer to our question may now seem 
very easy, and to be something like this: Let 
each man do what he pleases, whatever makes 
him happy. No one can tell another how to be 
happy. What brings happiness to one may not 
bring it to another. And indeed, this answer is 
in a measure the true one, but there is more to 
be said. A man may not know ; he may not have 
tried many plans; it may be that what does 
not bring joy might have done so if the man had 
had different experiences in life. It may be that 
we can be trained to get joy in ways not pos- 
sible otherwise, as in music or art or literature 
or nature. It may also be that we can classify 
happiness into high or more desirable and low 
or less desirable. Such indeed will prove to 
be the case. 

Let us see if some happiness is more desir- 
able than other happiness. We can find the 
truth by observing life. There is happiness 
that is brief, evanescent, that exists for the 
moment only. There is happiness that is fol- 



The Teacher's PHmosoPHY of Life. 7 

lowed by pain, and happiness that brings pain 
to others. There is other happiness that is last- 
ing, that is pleasant in memory, and that does 
not bring pain to us or to others. There is hap- 
piness that may be shared by many. It is there- 
fore desirable to seek those things that will 
bring us the highest happiness and no unhap- 
piness to others. 

Wise men teach us that the highest happiness 
comes from service, from making others happy. 
And this is true. Indeed, a high type of man can- 
not be happy if others near him are unhappy. 
The hearts of men should be so knit together 
in human sympathy that their joys and sorrows 
will all be mutual. Socrates and Jesus, our 
wisest teachers, not only spent their lives in 
helping others to find truth and through truth, 
happiness, but gave their lives for their ideal. 
This fact may seem fatal to our doctrine that 
we should seek those things that make us happy, 
but it is not. On the contrary, it is in harmony 
with that doctrine. Men have ideals for which 
they are willing to endure any mere bodily pain, 
even death. So it was with those two great 
teachers. Socrates' friends pointed out to him 
a way by which he could escape death, but he 
preferred death to life obtained by such a course 
as they advised. It may even be that the rule of 



8 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

our life should be not to ask whether a given 
course will bring happiness or unhappiness but 
whether it is right. For a noble man, doing 
right is one of the highest sources of happiness. 
But what acts are right? In a general way we 
may say that those acts are right which do not 
bring pain or unhappiness to others. There 
can be no other criterion. There is no absolute 
right. Acts have been labeled right or wrong 
according to their happiness effects on people. 
Ethical values are subordinate values, and de- 
pend entirely upon their effects on human hap- 
piness, human well-being. 

Happiness is a result ; it is an emotional state 
of mind that comes from what we see or hear or 
from our acts or from the thoughts that we 
think. Let us consider now some of the neces- 
sary conditions of true happiness. We shall dis- 
miss at once all consideration of the sensual plea- 
sures, and consider only the sources of the higher 
joys. 

First of all, there is Nature. We live in a 
world that throbs and pulsates at every point 
with energy, from the atom and molecule to 
the larger earth and moon and sun and stars 
and planets ; everything in its place ; everything 
related to all the others; each obedient to the 
laws of its being; law everywhere; all things 



The Teacher's Philosophy of Life. 9 

united into a unitarj^ whole. There is also the 
world of living things — the animate world. We 
have our choice. We can exist in these various 
worlds of infinite variety and beauty, without 
seeing them, without feeling them, without 
knowing them; or, they can indeed become our 
worlds, ours to study and understand, ours to 
enjoy. Rich and full is the life of him who goes 
forth each day in the hope of learning more of 
the world. All that science has yet learned 
about it is relatively little. Every day can re- 
veal to us something that was before hidden. 
Everything has its secret which it will yield up 
to the student, — the tiny flower in the meadow 
grass, the leaf that sways on its bough, the bird 
that sings in the apple tree, the grasshopper on 
the blade of corn, the pebbles and grains of 
sand on the creek bottom. Truly infinite are the 
objects of nature, each waiting for the student 
and ready to reward his efforts. There is no 
copyright on nature. She is everywhere and for 
everybody. The joys she gives us are not ex- 
clusive joys. She reveals her truths to me and 
to all who seek. Let us study nature. Let us 
have the joy that comes from understanding her. 
Let us learn to see the beauty that nature every- 
where shows. Let us lift ourselves out of the 
darkness of ignorance, out of the sordid triviali- 



10 The Teacher's Ideals op Life. 

ties of a narrow existence, and possess the higher 
wealth that nature has to give. Let us every day 
feel the thrill that comes from understanding, 
from discovery. Each day we can be a Colum- 
bus and sail on a voyage of discovery. If in our 
lifetime we can master all there is to learn in 
our backyard, we shall know more than Newton, 
Darwin, Kepler, Galileo, Gray, or Agassiz. To 
know the world is to love it and to enjoy its 
beauty. Everywhere we find law, organization 
harmony; everywhere, cause and effect; every- 
where, the universal law of evolution. Every- 
thing is dynamic, and the more we study the 
world, the more it seems that it is all alive, and 
the more we feel our kinship with it. Close 
study of the world that surrounds and envelops 
us makes it seem a different world, and makes 
our life seem a different life. It gives us a new 
perspective, a wider outlook. Our life in a real 
sense becomes a larger life. 

Over against the world of nature we may 
place the worlds which man has created — those 
of literature, art and music. In sculpture and 
painting, the artist embodies his conceptions of 
beauty. Every city and town should have their 
art galleries, the possessions of all the people, 
where the people could go at any time and have 
the enjoyment that comes from studying the 



The Teacher's Philosophy of Life. 11 

great paintings. Every home should have pic- 
tures on the walls, pictures as good as the people 
are able to afford. 

If education does nothing else for us, it should 
make possible the joys that come from books. 
The poet, the novelist, the dramatist, have been 
at work through the centuries, for us. Their 
books may be on our shelves at a trifling cost. 
We can spend the winter evenings with Homer 
and Virgil, Dante, Milton, Tennyson, Byron, 
Wordsworth, Longfellow, Lowell, Bryant, 
Browning, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, George 
Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray, or Bret Harte, as we 
like. 

Then, there is music, a source of enjoyment to 
all — music, creations of beauty in sound. A 
home without music is no home at all. Music 
has a power over our souls that few other things 
have. Its rhythms, its harmonies and melodies 
seem to reach and touch our higher natures as 
few other things can do. In every home, there 
should be a piano ; some one in the home should 
be taught to play it; every child in the home 
should be taught to sing. Every morning all 
the family should gather around the piano and 
begin the day with a song. And when the day 
is done, all should again gather around the 



12 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

piano and sing the dear old melodies that have 
brought comfort and gladness to many a soul. 

While man can find the higher joys in litera- 
ture, nature, art, and music, there are also other 
sources of happiness, sources of a different kind. 
They do not bring a particular joy at a partic- 
ular time, but give a permanent color or atti- 
tude to our lives. These are truth, justice, and 
sympathy. Anyone who studies the lives of 
men can see that there can be no permanent 
happinesss or contentment among men, without 
truth, justice and sympathy. Human life is so 
interrelated, we are so dependent upon others, 
that human relationships are more important as 
they affect happiness than is any other factor. 
The first and most important factor of this re- 
lationship is truth — sincerity, honesty. The 
social fabric is rotten unless held together by 
truth. If every child could be taught to speak 
the truth and to he true, much misery, pain and 
sorrow would disappear from the world. 

After truth, comes justice. If every man 
could be fair and just; if every laborer could 
receive the due reward of his labor, then hap- 
piness would increasingly prevail. At this 
moment the w^orld is in turmoil. Anarchy and all 
manner of ' isms ' that threaten to destroy civiliza- 
tion and throw us back into chaos, are every- 



The Teacher's Philosophy of Life. 13 

where raising their threatening voices and lift- 
ing up their bloody hands. The present state of 
disorder is in large measure because of injustice. 
"Man's inhumanity to man makes countless 
thousands mourn. ' ' Let us be just. Let us teach 
the child from infancy to be just. Let us em- 
body justice in our laws ; let us found our busi- 
ness and industries on justice ; let us be just in 
our opinions and judgments, and we shall in- 
crease the sum of human happiness. 

Sympathy is the greatest source of happiness 
because it includes the other social virtues. 
Sympathy means literally a feeling tvith another. 
It means that we identify our own lives with 
the lives and interests of others. Sympathy is 
the very heart and core of religion as it affects 
man's actions; it is the central principle of 
ethics; it is the main element of culture. The 
truly cultured man is he who can take an ob- 
jective view of himself, who can see himself 
and his petty world through the eyes of others, 
and who can see in others their worth and their 
rights. Sympathy takes us to the bedside of the 
sick, cheers the brokenhearted and the disap- 
pointed, wipes the tears from the eyes of the 
bereaved, takes the sinner by the arm and gives 
him strength, cheers the feeble footsteps of the 



14 The Teacher's Ideals op Life. 

aged, and fills the hearts of children with joy. 

Selfishness brings most of the pain and sor- 
row into the world; sympathy and love are the 
only means yet discovered that enable us in any 
degree to keep pain and sorrow out of the world, 
and to alleviate and soften that which in the 
ver}^ nature of things we cannot keep out. What- 
ever we may say of life, and whatever of hap- 
piness may come into it, it is still hard and filled 
with pain. As youth passes into old age, hope 
and ambition die, cherished desires are unful- 
filled, one by one we bury our friends and loved 
ones; each life is a daily tragedy and at last 
ends in a tragedy. Sympathy, the feeling for 
us that our brother has as he takes us by the 
hand and whispers his word of cheer, mingling 
his tears with ours, gives us strength and bright- 
ens our way. 

Sympathy reaches its highest state in true 
friendship and in the home. What is there like 
a true friend, our other self, for whom we could 
gladly die, and who, we know, would die for us? 
To have a friend who thinks of us each day, 
who suffers when we suffer and rejoices when 
we rejoice; to walk with him in the summer 
afternoons, and to sit with him under a tree 
by the brookside, listening to the birds and talk- 
ing in full understanding of nature and her 



The Teacher's Philosophy of Life. 15 

works, of man and his ways ; to sit with him on 
winter evenings by the open fire — to have such 
a friend makes mere existence pass into life. 

Sympathy reaches its highest fruition in the 
home where it becomes love. Home, love, father, 
mother, children — these are the sacred words in 
our language. In a home where there is love; 
where each thinks first of the others; where all 
rejoice together and sorrow together, happiness 
exists in its highest form. Home is the first and 
necessary condition of all the other sources of 
happiness. Nature, literature, art and music are 
usually ineffective unless there is a home. With- 
out a home, life itself is incomplete. A house 
does not make a home, nor even a house and 
people. Only members of a family who love one 
another, with mutual interests and with hearts 
in accord, make a home. To make such a home 
is the highest achievement of man, and to have 
such a home is the source of his greatest hap- 
piness. 

It seems that this world is such, and the 
nature of life is such, that most good things cost 
their price. It is so with happiness. The great- 
est happiness lies not along the path of least 
resistance; it costs us pain and labor. First of 
all, we have our inheritance of selfishness to 
subdue, our baser passions to control. To live 



16 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

a higher life, a life of truth and justice, re- 
quires courage and strength, patience and per- 
severance. To enable us to live such a life, there 
must be years of training. Moreover, to be able 
to get happiness from the sources which we have 
discussed, also requires training. Neither books 
nor nature give up their secrets and reveal their 
beauties to us until we have learned how to 
make them do so. To get much pleasure from 
music we must be trained. It therefore is quite 
true that there can be a training in happiness, 
and this training the home and school must 
give. 

From these considerations, it is evident that 
the work of the teacher is of the highest signifi- 
cance. She should be the true philosopher, wise 
in her knowledge of the world and of human life, 
striving ever to lead her pupils to acquire the 
highest conceptions and ideals of life, and to 
prepare them for the fullest possible realizations 
of these ideals. 



CHAPTER II 

IDEALS OF LITERATURE. 

We spend much time teaching children to read, 
eight years in the grade schools, four years in the 
high schools, to say nothing of the time spent in 
college and university — but who reads? The 
manager of a book store once told me that when 
students had finished a course in the university 
they brought their books to him and sold them 
for whatever he was willing to give — sold their 
Shakespeare, their Homer, their Virgil, for a 
few pennies ! This is a sad commentary on our 
teaching of reading. If the right attitude were 
developed in the students, the literary text would 
be kept through the term, almost as good as 
new at the end, with carefully made notes and 
commentaries in the margins. When the course 
is finished, the book would not be sold, but kept 
and cherished through life as one more dear 
friend. 

Our teaching of reading and literature often 
develops in the pupils a hatred for books. I 
have often heard high school students speak of 
the greatest treasures of literature as ''stuff." 
The causes of this state of things are many. All 

(2) (17) 



18 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

are due to our methods of teaching. I know a 
nine year old boy who will probably never like 
poetry. He will not voluntarily read anything 
that looks like poetry, nor allow it to be read to 
him. Why? His teacher requires him to com- 
mit to memory all the poems in his reader. Few 
of these poems are within his comprehension. 
Not one out of five appeals to his experience 
or interest. This teacher is unwittingly creat- 
ing in all the pupils in her room a distaste for 
poetry. Between the first year of grade school 
and the last year of high school some teacher 
usually manages by some method or other — usu- 
ally as foolish as the one mentioned — to destroy 
in the pupils all taste for literature. 

It would be interesting to take a census of 
the people of a community to ascertain how 
many men and women read. Such a census has 
never been taken, as far as I know. My observa- 
tion leads me to believe that not more than one 
man or woman out of a hundred reads. More 
time is spent in the teaching of reading than in 
teaching anything else, still no one reads. This 
teaching, therefore, is a great waste of time and 
energy. 

I say no one reads. Of course, all read the 
morning paper and the Saturday Evening Post, 
but who reads books? Yes, I know everyone 



Ideals of Literature. 19 

reads the Shepherd of the Hills, but who reads 
good hooks f Who reads Homer, Sophocles, 
Shakespeare, Ruskin, Carlyle, Emerson? 

AVhat constitutes a good book ? AVhat makes a 
good book so valuable? The man who writes 
a book puts into it his best thoughts. As the 
ages have gone by, some of the wisest men, men 
who have observed most closely and thought most 
deeply, have written books. By reading these 
books, we therefore gain access to the best 
thoughts of the wisest men, their reflections upon 
human life, its highest aims and purposes, human 
sin, human sorrow, human joy. Some of the 
world's best and greatest men have not written 
books. The two wisest men of aU time, Socrates 
and Jesus, wrote no books. Fortunately, how- 
ever, we get their teachings through the writings 
of others. To some it may seem a wonder that 
a book could come down to us through hundreds 
and even thousands of years. It does not seem 
possible to them that a writing could or would 
be preserved so long. But when we read these 
books we no longer wonder why they have sur- 
vived. When we read the dialogues of Plato, 
we can understand why they have been read and 
preserved these twenty-two centuries. As long 
as there are men who think and read, Plato will 
have readers. 



20 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

The greatests writings are usually the plainest 
and simplest. There is in some quarters the 
mistaken notion that a great book is difficult, 
hard to understand, and therefore inaccessible 
to the ordinary man. Such is not the case. 
Rather the reverse is true. The Bible needs no 
interpreter, neither does Plato nor Shakespeare. 
When the reader finds it difficult to understand a 
book, he may be sure that the writer did not 
understand himself, that he did not himself see 
clearly nor think sanely. Especially is this true 
when the writing is about human life. Human 
experience is much the same in all ages, in all 
countries. The human heart has not changed 
in historic times. Love and hate and envy and 
jealous}^, sin and selfishness, joy and sorrow, 
pain and death, are much the same in all places 
and at all times. The man who writes clearly 
and understandingly to the human heart at any 
time or place, speaks understandingly to the 
people of all time. Homer wrote of prehistoric 
Greeks and Trojans, but how modern are the 
characters I We seem to know Agamemnon and 
Menelaus, Achilles and Hector. The events nar- 
rated in the Iliad seem to have just taken place. 
Solomon and Job and Paul are modern though 
dead these thousands of years. However, I 
would not be misunderstood. To understand a 



Ideals of Literature. 21 

great book on any aspect of human life, we must 
ourselves have had experience and thought 
deeply about our experience. 

There is also a mistaken notion that to get a 
foreign literature, we must read the books in 
the original language. This is not true as far 
as the ideas of literature are concerned. Ideas 
are universal and can be expressed in any kind 
of characters or symbols. Love is love whether 
expressed as amo or ayaTzdd) or love. Death is 
death by whatever symbols represented. The 
Bible is a good illustration of this fact. Of all 
books, it is most universally read. Few books 
contain so much that is as good, perhaps none, 
anything that is better. No one book contains 
so much wisdom. No message is more important 
than its message, yet we do not think it is 
necessary for all our children to learn Hebrew 
or Greek in order that they may read and under- 
stand the Bible. Still we require millions of 
boys and girls to study Latin, when the returns 
are only a few score pages of Caesar, Cicero, and 
Virgil that could be read at a few sittings in 
the English translation. 

The great books are few because the great men 
are few. Genius is rare. There is a definite law 
governing the distribution of ability among us. 



22 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

There are a few idiots, a few geniuses, the rest 
of us come somewhere in between. It is some- 
thing of a genius to be one among a hundred; 
more, to be one among a thousand; more still, 
to be the best man of a million. Emerson and 
Lincoln stand out as the foremost of all Ameri- 
cans; Shakespeare, Socrates, and Jesus, as the 
foremost of all time. "When we speak of great 
books, then, we mean the books containing the 
wisdom and the artistic creations of those men 
who were first among the men of their time, 
who gave us the message of their age. In their 
works, we read the history of the world. 

Let it not be thought that all good books are 
for instruction. We read some books for the 
same reason that we look at paintings or listen 
to music. They appeal to the emotions. Homer 
and Virgil, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, 
Dante, Milton, and Tennyson wrote poems and 
tragedies that have been sources of pleasure to 
numberless generations of men. The poet is a 
creator. He paints in words the passions of the 
human soul, or the beauties that he sees in the 
world of nature. In the pictures we see our- 
selves. The poet may be said to reveal us to 
ourselves. In Oedipus, or Antigone, Hamlet, 
Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, Eichard the Third, or 
King Lear, we find ourselves, and see our own 



Ideals of Literature. 23 

sins and inmost natures portrayed, our emotions 
analyzed by the master mind of Sophocles or 
Shakespeare. But life is not all tragedy. The 
lyric poet sings for us our song of love. 

We must not forget the novelist, who weaves 
the same threads into a different form, and in 
one fabric, gives us the epics, the lyrics, the 
tragedies, and the comedies of life. The world 
of literature would be different without Nicholas 
Nickleby and Oliver Twist, Eomola, Vanity Fair, 
and Ivanhoe. 

Such is the nature of good books, but why read 
them? Every book which we have mentioned 
deals with some aspect of human life. Instead 
of reading dead books why not study living men ? 
This question has been so well answered by 
Emerson and Ruskin that it is both superfluous 
and presumptuous to try to say more. Indeed, 
no more can be said, but their answer can be re- 
peated in other words. 

Why not, then, study men rather than books? 
By all means, let us study men. Indeed, if we 
do not study men we shall study books to little 
purpose. But most of us know only the men 
of our neighborhood, the men whom chance has 
thrown into our way. Thankful may we be if 
among them there is one much above the others 



24: The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

in wisdom and judgment. We can know a few 
men in our own time, in our own country. Some 
of us are so fortunate as to know men of other 
countries, but even so, are limited in our ac- 
quaintance to the men of our own time. Even 
if very wise men are living in our own day, it 
is impossible for many of us to know them 
personally, and be able to speak to them face to 
face. Most of us, then, cannot know men of 
other lands, and none of us can know men of 
other days. However, we can go to our book- 
shelves and command the wisdom of all the 
ages. 

One of the most remarkable things in the 
world is that the past can be made to live again 
for us; that we can summons before us the 

men of the greatest intellects, and put our ques- 
tions to them. It makes no difference who we are 

nor where we live, if we wish to know what the 
great teachers have to say about morals and 
religion, we can call Confucius, Socrates, Solo- 
mon, Moses, Jesus, and Paul, and put our ques- 
tions to them. The answers which they give us 
are not based merely upon a moment's reflec- 
tion as would likely be the case if we should ask 
a living friend, nor are the men affected by bias 
or interest or prejudice. They give us their 
deliberate judgment based upon years of ob- 
servation and mature reflection. 



Ideals of Literature. 25 

In the trials and sorrows of life we can al- 
ways find some consolation and counsel in books. 
Whatever may be our mood, we can always find 
a book to speak to us in that mood. If the 
world seems unkind and unjust to us, if our 
cross seems more than we can bear, remembering 
Socrates and Jesus, we read the Phaedo, or the 
account of the trial and^ crucifixion of Jesus. 
If we are bereaved, some comfort is to be found 
in Lycidas and Adonais. If we wdsh merely 
to be amused or pleased, some one is ready in 
his book to sing to us or to tell us a story — 
Cervantes, Tennyson, Kipling, Mark Twain, Bret 
Harte, Scott, George Eliot, Hawthorne, Long- 
fellow, Lowell, Byron. When we become tired 
reading one author, we replace the volume on its 
shelf and there is no offense. We can take 
down another. They are there waiting to help 
us if they can. Fortunate are we, indeed, if we 
have been so trained that we can command their 
services. How unfortunate, if the world of 
books is a dead world to us ! 

Teachers can be of service to children in many 
ways, but it is doubtful whether they can do any- 
thing better than to lead them to know and love 
books. When children are very young, long 
before they are old enough to go to school, their 
parents should read to them. Soon the child is 



26 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

able to read for himself. Then, teachers and 
parents should place into his hands, books that 
he can understand and enjoy, and should help 
him to an understanding of them. By the time 
a child has reached high school, he should have 
heard or read all that is best and within his 
comprehension. At least one-fourth of the time 
spent in the high school should be devoted to 
reading. In the reading, the teacher is the 
leader, the guide, the adviser. The pupils are 
to read for enjoyment and for instruction. The 
reading for one child need not be the same as 
that for another. We are different ; authors are 
different. What one of us likes, another may 
not like. What is good for one of us may not 
even be good for another. But we must like 
something, and it is best for us if we like some- 
thing that is good. Anything that helps us is 
good for us. The school should develop taste and 
good judgment. But in trying to do this, it 
must be careful not to destroy all taste. There 
is no value or virtue in mere reading. Unless we 
read what profits us or gives us lasting pleasure, 
we may as well not read. Our public schools 
have, therefore, largely failed of their purpose, 
unless the pupils, when they leave the schools, 
have learned in the truest sense to read. No 



Ideals of Literature. 27 

child should be given a high school diploma un- 
til he has studied Shakespeare and come to 
some degree of comprehension of him. 

Of course, teachers must be readers. They 
must know all the good books. There are not 
many. In the long evenings of two or three 
winters, one can read most of the books that art 
worth reading, those that make us better men 
and women after we have read them. There is 
not more than one great writer for each century 
for the last twenty-five hundred years. Any 
teacher can know and read these twenty-five 
authors. The high school graduate can know 
them and may well have read many of them. 



CHAPTEE III 

IDEALS OF NATURE. 

The world of books is the creation of man. 
There is another world, older, infinite in beauty 
and variety, the World of Nature. By nature 
we mean the inanimate world and the world of 
life below man. This is an arbitrary distinction, 
for man is a part of the world of nature. 

While it is a pity for a man to go through life 
without the help and inspiration that come 
from books, it is, perhaps, more pitiful to live 
without seeing, understanding, and appreciating 
the world of nature. When we enter on our 
journey from birth to death, there are two pos- 
sibilities open to us. On the one hand, we can 
exist, take our food, breathe, perform all the 
vital functions necessary for mere physical life, 
but be blind and deaf and feelingless to all the 
objects and forces about us which make up the 
world in which we are immersed every moment 
of our lives. Such an existence is on a level of 
that of the pig or even of a fishworm, for they 
do as much. On the other hand, we cannot only 
exist, but live. The world can be a meaningful 
world to us. We are endowed with a dozen or 

(28) 



Ideals of Nature. 29 

more types of sense organs. From our brain the 
tiny nerves go out to every inch of the surface 
of our bodies, ending in delicate sense organs. 
They are the hands and fingers of the soul which 
reach out with their delicate touch to feel the 
world. In the skin they give us sense of pres- 
sure, cold, warmth, and pain; in the joints, of 
movement; in the mouth, they touch our food 
and give us taste ; in the nose, they feel of the 
currents of air and give us smell; in the ear, 
their sensitive touch feels of the waves of the 
air and gives us sound ; in the eye, the delicate 
nerve-fingers respond to the vibrations of ether 
and give us sight, revealing to us not only ob- 
jects nearby, but suns and planets millions of 
miles away. This sensory endowment, the pig 
also has. It can see the sun as well as we, but 
it cannot know on what day and hour and 
minute the moon will be between the sun and the 
earth and hide the sun from our view — ^we can. 
And there lies the great difference between us 
and the pig. The world can he to us a world of 
meaning. Of course, the difference here is only 
one of degree, for some things have meaning to 
the pig. To the pig, water is to drink; corn 
is to eat; a dog is to run from; a mudhole is 
to wallow in on a hot day. But how varied and 
infinite in meaning the world can be to us ! From 



30 The Teacher's Ideals op Life. 

the stars, on the one hand, immeasurably big 
and inconceivably distant, to bacteria, on the 
other, uncomfortably close, innumerable in num- 
bers and microscopically small, the objects ot 
the world fall into their proper places in the 
mind of man. 

The world of nature is here. It has always 
been here. It will always be here. We find our- 
selves in it, a part of it. We shall be here a 
little while. Shall vs^e make it ours through un- 
derstanding and appreciation, or shall we spend 
our short existence in it with the traditional 
eyes that see not and ears that hear not? 

We should understand nature in order to be 
able to control her forces and use them for our 
practical ends, but I am not thinking here of 
this practical side of the matter. Our considera- 
tion now is merely from the point of view of 
appreciation and enjoyment. Whatever other 
functions schools and teachers may have, surely 
one important function is to help children to 
discover the world. 

First of all there is the inanimate world, out 
of which all living things come and to which they 
return when they die. The earth is truly our 
mother Earth. We call it inanimate, we say it 
is dead and lifeless, but in the sense of being 
inert, inactive, static, it is not dead but full of 



Ideals of Nature. 31 

motion and ceaselessly active forces. Its face is 
being sculptured, the mountains daily carved 
away, its hills leveled down by chemical action 
and the eroding power of frost, air and water. 
The rocks are being ground down into soil from 
which comes all vegetation. The mountains lift 
their granite peaks high into the air which 
forever battles with them, inch by inch lowering 
their proud heads. The rivers flow on through- 
out the years and centuries, carrying always to 
the sea the tribute of the hills and mountains 
which it gathers by means of its myriad creeks, 
brooks, and rivulets. The rocks themselves of 
the all-but-everlasting hills are at once the monu- 
ment and tomb of the early life of the earth. 
In them we can trace our genealogy through 
starfish and crinoid. The inscriptions were 
carved by the animals themselves and the plants 
in the long ago, when they laid themselves down 
in the mud and slime of the primeval sea to 
be entombed for uncounted centuries. At last 
their resurrection comes. The hills give them 
up ; they live again on the wide plain far from 
the sea, in wheat fields and meadows of clover — 
a transmigration of souls undreamed of by the 
philosophers. 

In glacial drifts and moraines we have a still 
more interesting story for him who can read it. 



32 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

The great continent-wide ice mountain, during 
the long geologic winter crept slowly down from 
the north, chiseling, hewing, scraping, gathering 
its titanic load of earth and rock and lifeless 
forms of animals and plants, carrying all far to 
the south. At last under a warmer sun, it 
gives up its load of giant boulders, polished peb- 
bles, mountains of sand, all mingled with the 
lifeless forms of the fauna and flora of all the 
Northland. It gives them up and leaves a new 
earth with new rivers and lakes and hills. The 
eternal processes go on, ceaseless, inevitable ; on 
a large scale in making and unmaking mountains 
and oceans and continents ; on a small scale, but 
jast as effectively, in a single drop of water or 
grain of sand. No ! the earth is not dead but full 
of life for the mind that can see and understand. 
Above the earth are the sun and moon, the 
planets and stars. They are far away, and 
except for the sun and moon, have little effect 
on our earth. We need not bother much about 
them unless we wish ; they do not much concern 
us. But they too can be added to our world of 
undei^tanding and enjoyment, if we choose. 
Although they are so far away that we can form 
no proper conception of their distance, they are 
better understood by science in their movements 
and mutual relations than are many things close 



Ideals of Nature. 33 

at hand. The heavenly bodies meant much to 
primitive man who lived in the open, under the 
wide sky. He knew them and gave them names. 
To most of us they are unknown and without 
interest. But why not add the astronomical 
world to our possible worlds of pleasure? 

In the animate world, w^e have first the world 
of plants, which take the first step from rock 
toward man. They embed their roots in the 
soil, the graveyard of the past, and in the air 
above unfold their green leaves to the sun. In 
the leaves under the action of sunlight, living 
matter is made out of simpler material. Upon 
the green leaves of plants, all living things 
directly or indirectly depend. All the processes 
of the plants are interesting, none more so than 
those that go on in the flower, whose function is 
reproduction. 

We can manage to live in almost complete 
ignorance of the plant-world, if we wish, but in 
its beauty and variety it can become of intimate 
interest and importance to our lives. The proc- 
esses that go on in individual plants, the means 
which they use for survival, their interrelation- 
ships, their dependence upon their surround- 
ings — all become of great interest when we study 
them. To the close student, plants become of 
almost human importance. 
(3) 



34 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

In the great cities where men raise sky- 
scrapers instead of corn, plant-life is not of 
such immediate concern; but in the country, if 
the farmer will become a life-long student of 
plants, he will gradually open the doors to a 
world that rivals any of the other worlds in its 
possibilities for endless study and enjoyment. 

What a joy to know the trees, whether the 
giant Sequoias of California that were old when 
Jesus was born, and that have stood on their 
sentinel hills through thousands of years, or 
the oaks in our back yard that began their 
sturdy existence about the time when our re- 
public w^as born. The lover of trees feels like 
saying with Lowell : 

I care not how men trace their ancestry, 
To ape or Adam; let them please their 

whim ; 
But I in June am midway to believe, 
A tree among my far progenitors. 

The love of flowers can become a passion in 
our lives. The flower-lover is on the hills ere 
the snow has receded from the shaded recesses, 
watching for the first Anemone and Hepatica. 
When the Springbeauty blooms, he is there; 
he greets the Maybell and Columbine and Lady's 



Ideals of Nature. 35 

Slipper; he rejoices in all his flower friends as 
the season goes by till at last in its gorgeous 
red he finds the Cardinal flower, in its shaded 
background of green. It comes late in the fall 
in its richness of color to mark the summit and 
climax of all the painting of nature. 

The student of animal life is never without 
something interesting to study. The earth is 
covered with animals; the sea and the air are 
filled with them. They vary in size from the sin- 
gle-celled protozoan to the elephants and whales 
whose weight is to be measured in tons. They 
are infinite in variety; one species is different 
from another; no two animals of the same 
species are exactly alike. Though each is dil- 
ferent from all the others, still all are alike m 
many ways. Protoplasm, the physical basis of 
life, is essentially the same in all. The life 
processes of all animals are the same funda- 
mentally, the same in principle, though infinitely 
varied in details. The structure of the verte- 
brates is always the same in type, but the adap- 
tations range from that of the fish to that of the 
birds. The adaptations of typical and similar 
structures to varying functions are well nigh 
innumerable. 

All animals have the same problems to 
solve; they must get food and escape enemies; 



36 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

all must reproduce or the species goes out of 
existence. One could spend a lifetime in the 
study of a single species of animals and never be 
without an unsolved problem concerning them. 
If one becomes interested in animal life, he can 
find animals for study wherever he may be. 
Every pond is a theater of animal activity, and 
will furnish many a pleasant hour through the 
summer days to him who will study it. Insects 
and birds afford a large field for study; the 
insects, because of their number and variety; 
and the birds, because of their beauty and song. 

The insects are everywhere, in the air, water, 
earth, wood, decaying matter, in our houses, on 
every plant — ceaselessly and eternally making 
their little fight for life. Their life processes and 
developmental changes are of extreme interest. 
Every boy should be introduced to the insect 
world and those who choose to spend their 
leisure hours in the study of insects will al- 
ways find something to think about besides their 
neighbors' faults. 

Of birds we hesitate to speak, not because 
there is nothing to say, but because there is so 
much to say. Why should a person be allowed 
to go through life without adding to his possible 
worlds of enjoyment the world of birds? In 
winter or in summer, in city or in country, one 



Ideals op Nature. 37 

cannot step out of his door without seeing a 
bird. All of them are interesting, many are 
beautiful, many make music than which there is 
no better in the world, the orioles, the bobolink, 
the catbird, and the thrushes. In the pear tree 
beside our window many of them build 
their homes and enact their little dramas. 
From the economic point of view as well as from 
the aesthetic, it is a high duty of the schools to 
teach the children to know the birds. 

He who studies animals soon comes to see the 
unity of all life and to recognize his kinship with 
it. The amoeba slowly moving its microscopic 
form about in the slime of the brook bottom, the 
fish swimming above it, the dog running along 
the bank, the bird flying high in the air — all 
are bent on the same mission. Each is fighting 
out in its own way the battle of life, searching 
for food, fleeing an enemy, hunting a mate. 

The beginning of every animal is a single cell. 
Whether it spends its whole life in this simple 
form as do many of the lowest, or whether it 
grows to be an aggregation of millions of cells, 
is of little importance. The lives of all are 
essentially the same. After a few hours or 
days or months or years, each animal in its 
own way acting out its life-drama, the same 
end comes to all, the life of each ends in a 



38 The Teacher's Ideals op Life. 

tragedy, in death. A study of animals enlargas 
our conception of life and broadens our sym- 
pathies. 

Let us who are teaching the young, take them 
by the hand and lead them through the different 
avenues of nature. Let us go down to the brook- 
side and help the children to read the story 
of the pebble, to learn the biography of the 
frog and the legends of the trees. We shall let 
the birds teach them their songs, and the bees, 
their secrets. The drama of life is everywhere in 
progress. The old owl in the sycamore tells an 
interesting story about the crows that eternally 
bother him, but he is silent about how he spends 
the long hours after the sun is down. We must 
learn this from other sources. The mink, the 
muskrat, the groundhog, the blacksnake, the 
cricket — all have interesting stories for the chil- 
dren and for us, if we will master the language 
which they speak. 

All the lifeless things have their stories too. 
The boulder beneath our feet — if it could speak, 
what stories it could tell ! What comedies, what 
tragedies it could unfold! But it does speak, 
and the child can be taught its language. It 
is criminal for us to allow children to grow to 
maturitv without learning to read what is every- 



Ideals of Nature. 39 

where written. Let us open their eyes that they 
may see, their ears that they may hear, and their 
minds that they may understand. 

Some of the wise men who have written books 
help us to understand the book of nature and 
give us inspiration to read it. Among American 
writers, those who show the keenest appreciation 
of nature are Thoreau, Burroughs, Emerson, 
Bryant, and Lowell. The following lines from 
Bryant are familiar to all lovers of nature : 

To him who in the love of nature holds 
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks 
A various language; for his gayer hours 
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile 
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides 
Into his darker musings, with a mild 
And healing sympathy, that steals away 
Their sharpness ere he is aware. 

Stranger, if thou hast learned a truth which need 
No school of long experience, that the world 
Is full of guilt and misery, and hast seen 
Enough of all its sorrows, crimes, and cares, 
To tire thee of it, enter this wild wood 
And view the haunts of Nature. The calm shade 
Shall bring a kindred calm, and the sweet breeze 
That makes the green leaves dance, shall waft a balm 
To thy sick heart. 



40 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

The things, oh life! thou quickenest, all 

Strive upward toward the broad bright sky, 

Upward and outward, and they fall 
Back to earth's bosom when they die. 

All that have borne the touch of death, 

All that shall live, lie mingled there. 
Beneath that vale of bloom and breath, 

That living zone 'twixt earth and air. 

There lies my chamber dark and still. 

The atoms trampled by my feet 
There wait, to take the place I fill 

In the sweet air and sunshine sweet. 

Well, I have had my turn, have been 

Raised from the darkness of the clod, 
And for a glorious moment seen 

The brightness of the skirts of God. 

And in different mood, the following : 

Is this a time to be cloudy and sad. 
When our mother Nature laughs around; 

When even the deep blue heavens look glad. 
And gladness breathes from the blossoming ground 1 

There are notes of joy from the hang-bird and wren, 
And the gossip of swallows through all the sky; 

The ground-squirrel gayly chirps by his den, 
And the wilding bee hums merrily by. 



Ideals of Nature. 41 

The clouds are at play in the azure space 
And their shadows at play on the bright-green vale 

And here they stretch to the frolic chase, 
And there they roll on the easy gale. 

There's a dance of leaves in that aspen bower, 
There's a titter of winds in that beechen tree. 

There's a smile on the fruit, and a smile on the flower 
And a laugh from the brook that runs to the sea. 

And look at the broad-faced sun, how he smiles 
On the dewy earth that smiles in his ray; 

On the leaping waters and gay young isles; 
Ay, look, and he'll smile thy gloom away. 

Emerson takes us close to the heart of nature. 
There are no more beautiful lines in literature 
than the following: 

For Nature beats in perfect tune. 

And rounds with rhyme her every rune, 

Whether she works in land or sea, 

Or hide under ground her alchemy. 

Thou canst not wave thy staff in air. 

Or dip thy paddle in the lake. 

But it carves the bow of beauty there 

And the ripples in rhyme the oar forsake. 

In The Apology, Emerson tells us what is to be 
gleaned from Nature besides the material har- 
vests : 



42 The Teacher ^s Ideals op Life. 

Think me not unkind and rude. 

That I walk alone in grove and glen; 
I go to the god of the wood 

To fetch his word to men. 

Tax not my sloth that I 

Fold my arms beside the brook; 

Each cloud that floated in the sky 
Writes a letter in my book. 

Chide me not laborious band, 
For the idle flowers I brought; 

Every aster in my hand 

Goes home loaded with a thought. 

There v/as never mystery 
But 'tis figured in the flowers, 

Was never secret history 
But birds tell it in the bowers. 

One harvest from the field 

Homeward brought the oxen strong 

A second crop thy acres yield, 
Which I gather in a song. 



CHAPTER IV. 

IDEALS OF WORK 

Work! The most glorious word in our lan- 
guage is ivorh, for through work comes the only 
salvation of the soul. Instead of shirking and 
avoiding work, let us be thankful each day for 
it. Much of the trouble of the world comes 
through people trying to escape work. Some of 
us are all the time hunting for an easier job. 
We think our lot is hard. We see others making 
a living much more easily than v»'e. We think if 
we only had their place, life would be quite 
y/orthwhile. Particularly widespread is the no- 
tion that some kinds of labor are much more de- 
sirable than other kinds, more honorable, and 
that those who do this more honorable work 
should be accorded more respect. This is a 
false notion and leads to much, very much, of 
the pain and sorrow and even sin of the world. 
Work is work. We live a social life. There are 
many kinds of work that must be done if society 
is to exist. Coal must be mined, transported on 
the trains, and delivered to the consumer. Some 
one must go down into the earth and mine it; 

(43) 



44 The Teacher's Ideals op Life. 

some one must run the train that hauls it ; some 
one must throw it out of the car and deliver it 
to the consumer. Wheat must be raised, thresh- 
ed, hauled to the mill and ground into flour, then 
the flour must be delivered to the consumer. 
Some one must raise our hogs and cattle ; some 
one must butcher them; some one distribute 
them to the consumer. Roads and streets must 
be built and kept in repair. Some one must 
build our houses ; some one, our railroads. Others 
must keep the railroads in repair. In connection 
with distribution, some one must run the stores ; 
others, the banks; others must work in the fac- 
tories that make our shoes and our clothes and 
our tools. Each work is necessary; being neces- 
sary, each kind of work is as important as any 
other. It is dangerous to society for any other 
view to be taken. It matters little what part you 
do or what part I do. The important thing is 
that each does some part, some necessary part. 
It would, perhaps, be best if each should do what 
he could do best, but apart from this, it makes 
little difference what we severally do. 

There is a tendency among some people to 
look with condescension upon those who work 
with their hands. If any distinction at all is to 
be made, the greater honor should go to him 
who has made with his hands some needful thing, 



Ideals of Work. 45 

who has in a sense become a creator. He who 
raises a fine tomato, or chicken, or hog, or field 
of wheat; he who builds a good and beautiful 
house, or makes a good, substantial road or street, 
is the real creator, not he who buys and sells the 
produce, or he who keeps other peoples' money 
to loan to actual producers. I say, if there 
should be any distinction whatever, the greater 
honor should go to him who produces, who cre- 
ates. But there should be no distinction among 
those who do any necessary work, whether in 
production or distribution. 

Work conquers all things, and few possessions 
worth having come without labor. 

''At the devil's booth are all things sold, 
Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of 
gold." 

The price that must be paid is so much labor. 
If every man and woman who are not at work 
doing something that needs to be done, would 
go to work at some useful production or take 
some part in the necessary distribution of com- 
modities, much of the misery and sin of the world 
would disappear. Idleness is the gate that 
leads to sin, and sin is the road to hell. It is 
true there is much injustice in the social and 



46 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

economic world. Many worthless and lazy crea- 
tures live upon the labor of others. The great- 
est crime is idleness. He who does not do his 
proper part of work is a criminal and has no 
right to sustenance. If society ought to hang 
any man, it should be the one who, without 
working himself, lives upon the labor of others, 
for he is both a thief and a murderer. He is 
stealing the fruits of others' labor, and in a 
sense taking their lives. 

The schools should glorify labor, and should 
do something definite, specific, and direct toward 
fitting the young for some honest, needed kind of 
work. To some extent a few schools do this, but 
it is too common for them to do the reverse, 
namely, encourage children to strive to be clerks, 
lawyers, doctors, anything, in short, save a good, 
honest producer. Of course some should be en- 
couraged to become lawyers and doctors, but 
not all. These two professions are already over- 
crowded by persons who might, some of them, 
be able to make an honest living digging ditches 
or sweeping streets. It is as necessary that 
ditches be dug as that the sick be cured, and if 
one can dig ditches better than he can cure the 
sick, then he ought to dig ditches. And society 
should give the ditchdigger his proper reward. 



Ideals of Work. 47 

What joy is there like that which comes from 
labor? From a good day's work well done? 
Who enjoys his supper so well as he who has 
earned it by hard labor? Who sleeps so well 
or enjoys that sleep so much as the man who has 
followed the plow all day, or who has been busy 
with hammer or saw or ax°? Our bodies are 
motor machines and keep in best repair when 
used in manual work. Those of us who forget 
this, pay for our neglect very dearly through 
the trouble and discomfort of one or more func- 
tional disorders. Every one, whatever his oc- 
cupation, should do some physical work each 
day, if for no other reason, in order to main- 
tain health. If we are ever to be a race of 
people who live by brain work only, we shall 
have to evolve into a different sort of physical 
being, have a different kind of body. Those we 
now have are made for physical work. The cities 
are filled with professional men — men trying to 
escape hard manual labor — who, for the most 
part, sit on chairs all day. Their bodies are 
not made for that kind of existence, and nearly 
all the organs of the body are soon out of func- 
tion. The men become a prey to ignorant doc- 
tors, who are also hunting the easy road to 
happiness. 



48 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

Let us glorify work, but especially good work. 
We must develop in children high ideals of 
workmanship. We must so train them that they 
cannot be satisfied with a poor piece of work. 
Poor workmanship is one of our American sins. 
We build poor houses, make shoddy clothes, 
cheap and poorly bound books, poor tools, ' ' rag- 
time" music, and ephemeral literature. Let 
us develop and train workmen who will be 
satisfied with only the best that they can do, who 
will be unwilling to do a poor piece of work. The 
schools must develop high ideals of work as of 
everything else. 

There are today educational tendencies which 
not only throw manual labor into disrepute, but 
all kinds of hard, honest work. There are edu- 
cational reformers who try to find an easy road 
to learning, an easy road to success. Men have 
been hunting this road as long as they have been 
searching for the fabled fountain of immortal 
youth. There is no such road. There is no pos- 
session worthwhile that comes without labor, and 
usually the more worthwhile, the more the labor 
that is required. He who teaches the doctrine 
that a child should receive his education in 
homeopathic doses, in the form of sugar-coated 
pellets, and be anaesthetised besides during the 
process of administration, is an enemy to society 



Ideals of Work. 49 

and destructive to civilization. Such teaching is 
in part responsible for the growing discontent 
and lawlessness, socialism and anarchy. The boy 
who receives a training which develops onl„v 
flabbiness, grown to maturity, finds the bitter 
pills awaiting him are not sugar-coated, and no 
anaesthetics are provided. The only way we 
can be trained to master difficulties is by master- 
ing difficulties. 

While work is important for men and women 
it is more important for boys and girls, because 
it is an absolute necessity for their proper educa- 
tion and training. We are getting far away 
from primitive conditions under which civiliza- 
tion developed, and under which it has existed 
until very recent times. The present tendency is 
for the population to become aggregated in cities. 
Boys cannot be properly reared in cities because 
there is nothing there for them to do. How can 
a boy be trained when there is nothing for him 
to do? He cannot be trained in a vacuum. 
The most important aspect of education comes 
not in dealing with books, which are about 
things, but with things themselves. The child 
needs that contact with things which he gets on 
a farm, where he can have connections with 
animals and plants, where he can have intimate 
relations with hogs and horses, cows, fowls, 



50 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

machinery, trees, corn, potatoes, weeds, hoes, 
plows, shovels, hammers, and axes. It is dif- 
ficult to find enough suitable work in the cities 
for the boys. 

There is a certain stamina necessary to char- 
acter that comes only from contact with duty 
and with arduous responsibilities. A proper 
training includes learning to stick to a task, 
though the task bring pain, to stick to it 
''through thick and thin." It is hard to find in 
the large city, work that gives such training as 
well as following the plow all day, or hoeing all 
day, or pitching hay all day, in fact, doing any 
hard manual work all day beneath a hot summer 
sun. When one has learned to go on though the 
legs ache, though the back aches, though every 
bone and muscle in the body seem to ache, he 
has a form of training that is indispensible in 
a strenuous life. Such a training is best sup- 
plied by manual work. 

In the cities, about the only possibility for 
work is in the factories. But our state legis- 
latures have passed laws forbidding child labor. 
Their purpose is to free the young from labor 
so that they may get an education. An educa- 
tion indeed ! It is the smallest part of an educa- 
tion that can be got in school from books alone. 
It would be better for the state to compel the 



Ideals of Work. 51 

boys to work and to find suitable work for them, 
more suitable than filling glasses at a soda 
fountain. 

The only possibility for proper training of 
the young in cities, it seems to me, is a union of 
the schools and industries, so that children may 
spend a part of the day, or a part of the week, 
in factories, in actual productive work, and the 
rest of the time in school. The school work itself 
must be reorganized in order to meet better the 
industrial needs of the child. It is a pity to 
allow the child of the city to grow to maturity 
without having done any productive work, with- 
out having learned the meaning of the words 
diity and responsibility . 

The motive underlying the laws preventing 
child labor is sound and wise. Children should 
not be employed for long hours, nor should em* 
ployment keep them out of school entirely. But 
the cure is almost as bad as the disease ; it may 
be worse. For a boy to go to school and study 
books till he is nearly, a man, without having 
meanwhile, the training that comes from pro- 
ductive labor, is as bad as working all this time 
without having opportunity to learn what is of- 
fered at school. We should have neither extreme. 
We should have both the training that comes 
from books and the training that comes from la- 



52 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

bor. Our cities have few graver problems than 
that of finding suitable work for the young. A re- 
organization of the work of the schools would 
partly solve the problem. The work of the 
school is now too abstract, too bookish, too far 
from reality. The world outside the school room 
is throbbing and humming with activity. In 
comparison, the work of the school is dead. It 
deals too much with a dead past. When it 
deals with the problems of today, it treats them 
in much the same way as it does the problems 
of the past. As a consequence, the present be- 
comes dead also. We cannot educate the young 
in a cemetery. In some way or other, the in- 
dustries must be taken into the schools, or the 
schools taken to the industries. 

Work is real; it deals with realities; it is 
not make-believe as school work too often is, 
School work does not become sufficiently incor- 
porated into the child's real world. The boy 
who grows to maturity, without learning to la- 
bor with his hands, without learning what it is 
to expend a certain amount of energy in re- 
turn for a dollar ; without having learned what 
it means to earn his shoes or his hat or a meal or 
a book, by actual labor has failed to get one 
of the essentials of a true education. The boy 



Ideals of Work. 53 

who has not learned to produce something has 
missed an important essential in education. 

Of the work of girls and women, I hesitate to 
speak. I find myself out of sympathy with 
what seem to be present tendencies. The home 
that was formerly the place of manifold activi- 
ties, now in the cities is largely a place of idle- 
ness. The industries have all left it. The wo- 
men, some of them, are going out after the in- 
dustries; othei^ go out for Bridge; others to 
run the world of politics and business; others, 
to reform the world generally. AVhen the wo- 
man leaves the home, there is no home left. 
With no home, there will be no civilization. The 
proper work of woman is to make a home, and 
that is no small task. Let her claim again the 
work which she can do best and that ought to be 
done in the home. If she can find nothing else 
to do, she might educate her children. Of 
course, if she chooses so to do, she need not have 
a home nor children. She can live her free and 
independent life in the active busy world, out- 
side. Fortunately^ each woman who so chooses 
thereby ends the line of descent of her kind. 
She cannot give her privilege to posterity be- 
cause she leaves no posterity. This world needs 
nothing more than it needs happy homes. May 
wise women turn their attention toward making 
them. 



54 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

Tbe problem of work for girls in the cities 
must surely be easier of solution than that of 
work for boys. A home can be so managed as 
to have plenty of work for the girls in helping 
their mother. Home industries should be re- 
stored to the home in sufficient number to fur- 
nish plenty of work for the girls, such work as 
cooking, washing, sewing, keeping the house in 
order, and even gardening. 

While work has important intrinsic values, its 
chief value for adults at least, is as a medium 
of exchange. It may be likened to money. Gold 
and silver have certain intrinsic values but 
their chief use is to be exchanged for something 
valuable in itself. I want food to eat, a coat 
for my back, I must work for them. I want a 
book to read, a piano to play, a picture for my 
room, I must work for them. I wish for a house, 
a home, a fireside, I must work for them too. 

Now let us see what can be said for mental 
work. In what has been said I may seem to 
have been unfair to him who does mental work. 
I have not meant to be so. There is a training 
from physical work that seems difficult for the 
young to get from mental work, but apart from 
this fact, any needful work is as honorable as 
any other. We need nothing any more than we 
need good thinking. For the happiness of all, 



Ideals of Work. 55 

we need good books, good music, beautiful pic- 
tures. In the carrjdng out of any enterprise, 
in the running of any factory, there is thinking 
and planning that must be done or the actual 
physical work will not be effective or profitable. 
The head and the hand must co-operate. Often 
the man who can plan the work cannot do the 
work, and the man who can do the work can- 
not plan the work. Either man without the 
other is to a large extent helpless. The task 
needs them both; they must co-operate and 
share equally in the rewards and honor. The 
men who invented the telephone and telegraph 
did a great service to us, so do the men who 
put up the poles and string the wires. The men 
who write great books make us all their debtors, 
SG do the men who set the type and print the 
books. In all the history of the world there 
has been but one Plato, but one Shakespeare. It 
may be that he who in his field of work excels 
all others should have most praise. But in a 
sense any one of us can do as well as Plato or 
Shakespeare, or in other fields as well as New- 
ton or Darwin or Kepler. We can do our best. 
They did no better. No one can transcent his 
nature. It will be best for the happiness of all 
of us if we count all necessary work as of equal 



56 The Teacher's Ideals op Life. 

value. It may be that within any given field 
of work, it will do no harm to give more praise 
for the better work. 



CHAPTER V. 

IDEALS OF PLAY. 

Work is a means to an end; play is an end 
in itself. Work is important because in work 
Vv^e must pay for valuable possessions. Play is 
the antithesis of work. We work because we 
must; we play because we can not help it. 
I*lay is the free expression of our nature, our 
inmost and oldest self. In play we more truly 
and fully live than in any other activity, be- 
cause more of our nature goes into play. We 
work in order that the fruits of our labor may 
supply our bodily and spiritual needs; play it- 
self supplies many of these needs directly. 
Work is great because through it come many of 
the good and necessary things of life; play is 
great because it is a good thing itself. 

While work is the most glorious word in our 
language, play and childJiood are the sweetest. 
After our early days are over, throughout all the 
years of toil, trouble, sorrows, and disappoint- 
ments of our mature life and old age, sweet 
are the memories of infancy and childhood. 
Treasured, holy and hallowed are the recollec- 

(57) 



58 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

tions. How often in memory we live that early 
life over again. 

The world of our infancy was small, a house, 
a yard, a eat and a dog, father and mother. In 
this world we lived and played. From morn- 
ing till night we were ceaselessly busy, explor- 
ing the virgin mysteries of our little world. The 
tools of our craft were a stick, an old pan, a 
ball, and some blocks. Every day, every hour, 
presented some new mystery, some new prob- 
lem. We gradually enlarged the boundaries of 
our world which in childhood came to include 
the barn and barnyard with their wonderful 
inhabitants — horses, cows, hogs, and chickens. 
What is childhood without a barn with its hay 
mow? No palace in a city can equal a country 
bam for childhood. 

Our little world of infancy grew fast. It 
soon extended to the creek, the hills, the woods, 
with their interesting wild creatures. In this 
larger world, our life expanded. The days were 
not long enough. What day could be long 
enough for us to learn all we wanted to know 
about the fishes, the frogs, the snakes, the crows, 
the jaybirds, and the squirrels? We came to 
possess a knife and at once gained a new con- 
trol over the world. We carved our name on 
the old sycamore, cut switches from the birch, 



Ideals of Play. 59 

made whistles from the elm and hickory. At 
last we made a bow and arrow, and became a 
full-blooded Indian. We made a trap, set it in 
the thicket by the creek and caught quail and 
rabbits. We posse.ssed a gun in early youth, and 
in the deep snows, over the fields and through 
the woods we trudged, with our bellowing 
hound, hunting rabbits. Across the years that 
intervene, I hear that deep, bass bellow still, and 
on its sweet notes my soul is carried back to 
those dear days that are no more. 

How intense are the experiences of early life. 
Every day something transpires that makes its 
indelible impression. The world is to us then a 
virgin world. Each experience is new. Later, 
life becomes monotonous ; each day like the one 
before. We search often in vain for new ex- 
periences. Not so with childhood and youth. If 
we could prolong childhood; if we could retain 
its spirit through life, the world would be dif- 
ferent. In a measure this can be done. The se- 
cret lies in play. Let us play all our life. Let 
us go down to our graves with a toy in our 
hands, and all our lives we shall be as children. 

Beautiful is the play of children about the 
family fireside. In all the scenes of life from 
birth to death, there is none so sweet, so divine, 
so holy, as that of a happy family in the home, 



60 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

gathered around the lamp before an open fire, 
reading, talking, and playing games. Such, 
scenes are as near heaven as any we have on 
earth. There is the dear grandmother, filling 
her honored place in the easy chair, holding on 
her lap the infant grandson. The father inter- 
mittently reads the newspaper, the mother 
brings in the doughnuts and the apples, and 
joins in the games of the children. 

Parents should live with their children and 
play with them much more than they do. In 
the country the relations of fathers and sons, 
mothers and daughters, are still very intimate; 
but in the city, this is often not the case. The 
city home frequently is no home at all. Family 
relations are loose or non-existent. Civilization 
rests upon the home. There can be no home unless 
the members of the family are bound together 
b}' the strongest and most intimate of ties. In 
the country the members of the family can both 
work together and play together; in the city 
they can at least play together. When the day 's 
work is over, the family should be united for 
the evening 's entertainment, for the family play. 
The evening should be planned for. We make 
plans for everything else, why not make plans 
for our family life? If we are in the poultry 
business, we make extensive plans and take great 



Ideals of Play. 61 

precautions in the rearing of chickens; why 
should not parents plan at least as carefully for 
the rearing of their children? This planning 
should fall largely to the mother, and for this 
work she should be trained. The training should 
be as extensive, as careful, as scientific, as that 
given to a physician. What greater career 
should a woman want? We are concerned here 
only with the play and entertainment side of 
the family life. For this the mother's training 
should include music, story telling, reading, 
games, and an intimate knowledge of flowers, 
birds, insects, trees, and indeed the whole won- 
derful world of nature. 

When the day's work is done, then, the fami- 
ly comes together for play. The possibilities are 
great. There can be reading and stories, music, 
and dancing by the children, and games in great 
variety. Care should be laid aside. The school 
should not send home large assignments of 
school work to be done. The evening should be- 
long to the home and not to the school. No out- 
side interests should dominate the home in the 
evening. The music should include songs. Ev- 
ery girl should learn to play the piano and to 
sing, as part of her professional preparation. A 
girl should no more think of marrying without 
being able to play the piano and sing than she 



62 The Teacher's Ideals of Life, 

should, without being able to sew and eook, and 
manage a household. 

In the summer there can be much play out- 
of-doors. The day is much longer. After sup- 
per there are two or three hours of daylight, time 
enough for an excursion. Saturday afternoon 
and part of Sunday should frequently be de- 
voted to picnics and outdoor activities. In these 
the father should, of course, participate. A fa- 
ther's evenings, and in fact most of his time 
when he is not at work, belong to his family, 
particularly to his boys. With them he should 
play, frequently taking trips with them to the 
woods and to the streams. He should be versed 
in the lore of woodfolk. If he is not, let him 
learn with his children. If parents will iden- 
tify themselves with the lives of their children, 
it will not only be to the great joy and advantage 
of the children, but to the parents as well. It will 
keep them young, drive their cares away, and 
give them strength and courage for their work. 
It should be a joy during the hours of work to 
look forward to the evening of play with the 
children. 

The school is a place for work ; it should also 
be a place for play. The teachers should be as 
well prepared to direct the play of the children 
as to direct their work. Every school building 



Ideals of Play. 63 

should have at least one man among the teachers 
so that there will be a proper leader for the plays 
of the boys. Suitable games of all kinds should 
be provided for, especially ball games. As soon 
as a boy can throw a ball and use a bat, he 
should play base ball. There should be frequent 
games between the grades and between different 
schools. Athletic contests of all kinds should be 
frequent. Proper physical play will not only 
bring joy but a well developed body. If we 
are not to become a race of physical degenerates, 
we must take as much care in the proper train- 
ing and development of the body as of the mind. 
Not only should there be the athletic play out- 
side, but other kinds of play inside the school 
room, some of it as part of the school work, some 
purely for play. Dramatization can form a 
very vital part of the regular school work and 
bo a great source of enjoyment. In all grades 
there should be much music ; and literary exer- 
cises of all kinds should be at least weekly oc- 
currences. Pageants should be frequent. School 
life should be rich and varied. There should be 
plenty of hard work, but also abundant play 
and joy. The school should be a happy place, 
where children would delight to be. 

The school house and grounds should have 
a wider use for play and entertainment purposes 



64 The Teacher's Ideals op Life. 

than is now the case. They belong to the com- 
munity and cost great sums of money, but dur- 
ing the summer months are not used. Why 
should not the people of the community gather 
there on summer evenings for story telling, for 
music, pagents and other dramatic exercises? 
Many schools have a victrola, bought with the 
peoples' money. All summer it serves only to 
accumulate dust. On summer evenings this vic- 
trola should be taken out on the school grounds, 
where the people are gathered sitting on the 
grass under the trees to listen to its music. It 
would not cost much to employ a director for 
these summer activities. The teachers might 
take turns directing these activities. The results 
would be pleasure and profit, and the saving of 
many a child from perdition. 

The play needs of the country are somewhat 
different from those of the city. Country chil- 
dren have enough activity for health and growth. 
Sometimes the activity is not sufficiently varied. 
The play at school could be very much enriched 
and diversified. The country school needs a 
teacher skilled in the science and art of play. 
The country school should have even a larger 
place in the life of the people than the city 
school. The school house in the country is the 
only one that can be used in common for gen- 



Ideals of Play. 65 

eral purposes of entertainment. Through the 
winter all the people should meet there at least 
one night a week for literary and musical enter- 
tainments, spelling matches, lectures, as well as 
for mere social talk and pleasure. Through the 
summer months, they should meet there at least 
on Saturday afternoons and have a base ball 
game, or a pageant, or some other kind of play 
by the children. Such a use of the school would 
unite the people, bind them together, unify 
their interests, and be a source of great pleasure 
to all. The community should take pride in 
the building and the grounds, and develop this 
pride in the children. The building should be 
the most beautiful in the whole district. The 
grounds should be large, with shade trees, shrubs, 
and flower beds, and plenty of room for all kinds 
of games. 

Men and women, as well as children, should 
play. It is natural for children to play, and 
play makes up a large part of their lives. It 
is also natural for adults to play, but we become 
engrossed m our work, lose our youthful spirit, 
and forget to play. We pay dearly for this 
course. We pay for it in loss of health and 
vigor, and in loss of joy. We grow old before 
our time and approach our graves with indiges- 
tion and pessimism. The visions and hopes and 
(5) 



66 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

ambitions of youth die, one by one. There is 
nothing left to look forward to but the end of 
the journey. Our face lengthens out, becomes 
furrowed with wrinkles, our eyes become luster- 
less and lose their fire. This is all unnecessary. 
We can remain young ; we can still be boys and 
girls at eighty if we will only play. Play for 
adults is recreation in the true sense of re-cre- 
ation. Our work, particularly professional 
work, uses up our nervous energy at too fast a 
rate. We need to fall back upon our older self 
for a part of the time each day, renew our youth, 
and let the ancestral man within come forth and 
express himself. It is not enough that we take 
an annual vacation; we should take a vacation 
each day. For at least a short time each day wo 
should throw off the age that is trying to grow 
up within us, forget the grey that is coming m 
our hair, laugh and romp and play with children 
and with our fellows, and be young again. 
Whenever we play, we are children; if we al- 
ways play, we shall remain children in spirit. 

We should take a lesson from the ancient 
Greeks, in whose lives play was an important 
factor. It is no accident that the Greeks, the 
greatest of all peoples, were the greatest players. 
In those ancient days, whole populations would 



Ideals of Play. 67 

come together for athletic and intellectual 
games. Their many and various festivals were 
important events in their lives. 

It is as important that a man have a life-time 
play interest as that he should have his profes- 
sional or occupational interest. Every man 
should have some sort of play or hobby into 
which he can, for a part of each day, throw 
himself with the vigor, enthusiasm, and abandon 
of youth. For a city man this can be gardening, 
poultry raising, or some line of investigation, an 
interest in insects, or flowers, or trees, or birds. 
It makes little difference what it is, if it is an 
interest that can wholly possess him and last 
through his life. 

We have opposed work to play ; we have con- 
sidered them as antithetical, and in a measure 
they are. There are certain characteristics that 
inhere in work that set it apart as different from 
play. Nevertheless, our work is never very ef- 
fective unless we can throw into it some of the 
spirit which is characteristic of play. As long 
as our work is drudgery, as long as we approach 
it with distaste and aversion, we never do our 
best. It is only when we approach it with the 
same feeling that a boy has in his base ball gamxC 
that we do our most effective work. In other 
words, our best work is done when it is play, 



68 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

when we can delight in the work itself. This 
outcome will be the result of two factors. By 
remaining young through play, we are able 
to approach our work in the play spirit. We 
can also study our work, find ways to improve it, 
increase our skill in it, and get the joy that 
comes from work well done. 

It is evident that if play is to be a large part 
of the life of a community, the teachers should 
be the greatest of players. They should not only 
be skilled in all the games and participate in 
them, but should be young in spirit, and should 
be in sympathy with childhood and youth. 
Teachers should be strong and perfect in body; 
this is quite as important as is the matter of 
their intellectual fitness. After teachers have 
lost their youthful spirit and youthful sympa- 
thies, they should not remain in the school room, 
for they will destroy life instead of creating it. 



CHAPTER VI 

IDEALS OF DEMOCRACY. 

The American public schools should be the 
temples of democracy; the teachers, its high 
priests. No one who is not sound in his de- 
mocraej^ should be allowed to teach our chil- 
dren. The spirit of democracy is equality. 
When will the world learn the true meaning of 
the word? It has been nearly a century and a 
half since the founders of our republic de- 
clared that "all men are created free and equal." 
It has been nineteen centuries since Jesus 
taught that we should love one another. The 
unthinking may wonder why ethical progress 
is so slow, but the reason is not far to seek. The 
inborn nature of man today is essentially the 
same as that of the men who listened to the 
words of Jesus. We are the same at heart as 
our ancestors of long ago. And at heart we are 
selfish. The teaching of the Bible that we must 
be born again is true. Our natures must be ma- 
terially changed before we are fit to live to- 
gether in any degree of harmony and happiness. 
All the virtues on which democracy rests must 
be developed in us or strengthened by training. 

(69) 



70 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

Nearty all the pain and suffering and sorrow 
in the world arise directly or indirectly out of 
selfishness, unkindness and lack of sympathy. 

In one sense, the Declaration of Independence 
is wrong — we are not created equal. To the 
student of human nature, nothing is more con- 
spicuous and striking than the fact of individual 
differences. Some of us are tall; others, short; 
some of us have good eyes and ears; others, 
poor. So also, we differ in every aspect and 
detail of our minds. Nature has been kind to 
some of us, unkind to others. No, we are not 
equal, nor can we be made equal, but in a de~ 
mocracy^ we should have equal rights. 

Every child has the right to be trained, edu- 
cated, nurtured physically and mentally so as 
to attain the highest manhood possible. Every 
man has the right to life, liberty, and the pur- 
suit of happiness in whatever manner he may 
desire, if the attainment of the desire does not 
involve the unhappiness of others. Every man 
has the right to be treated as a man, whatever 
may be his occupation or station in life, what- 
ever the kind of clothes he may wear. Ever>' 
man has the right to his beliefs and convictions, 
and the right to carry them out in his actions 
so long as they do not interfere with such equal 



Ideals of Democracy. 71 

rights of others. Every man has the right to 
the sympathy and co-operation of others. 

Equality and justice should be the foundation 
of a democracy, but the most casual observation 
shows us that inequalit}^ and injustice cause ev- 
erywhere sorrow and suffering. There is de- 
veloping in this country a caste system more 
dangerous than any the world has seen, a sys- 
tem based on money alone. Society is becoming 
stratified into numerous distinct layers, from 
what is thought to be the highest to what is 
called the loivest. There are numerous indica- 
tions of the stratum to which one belongs — house, 
furniture, clothes, number and splendor of par- 
ties given, the amount of money the person can 
afford to waste. Among the many uses of the 
automobile is that it indicates station in life. 
First there are those people who have none, 
then come the thousands who ride in the kind 
that starts with a crank, then a well differentia- 
ted array of those riding in higher and higher 
priced cars. Finally come the few who ride in 
cars costing many thousands of dollars. The 
extreme fineness of social distinctions is well 
illustrated by the marriage of a certain house- 
maid who refused to invite to her wedding a 
close friend whose station in life, forsooth, was 



72 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

only that of waiter in a restaurant ! A girl who 
works in a restaurant cannot belong socially to 
that group of girls who work in private homes. 

When we give a party we invite as guests peo- 
jjle who belong in our own stratum or layer, not 
those below; but are happy indeed if we can 
secure the presence of anyone from a layer above 
us. If the governor condescends to dine with 
us, we proclaim it from the housetops, and fear- 
ing that some one may not know it, we drive him 
about town showing him off — as they do the big 
elephant in the circus street parade — as exhibit 
number one in our claim for social distinction. 
If some humble friend in shabby clothes comes 
to dine with us, we keep it a secret ; the fact 
does not appear in the social column of the 
city daily ; and when he leaves, we drive him to 
the train in a closed carriage after dark. 

While social stratification is bad, worse still is 
the fact that everyone in any given stratum is 
trying to get into the layer supposed to be next 
higher. Devices innumerable are used to se- 
cure notice from those in stations above. Nor 
a day passes on which crimes are not committed 
whose sole purpose is to enable some one to as- 
cend to a higher social level. The crime itself is 
commonly committed by husband or father. The 
person for whose benefit it is committed is usual- 



Ideals op Democracy. 73 

ly wife or daughter. The crime itself is usually 
some form of theft or robbery. The wife wants 
a home or furniture or a dress or a car finer 
than those of her neighbors. The husband 's in- 
come is insufficient to afford it, so he steals. 

It is not enough that we have possessions, but 
we want to be known to have them, as the emi- 
nent Ruskin long ago pointed out. It is not the 
absolute value of things that pleases us, but their 
relative value, their being better than the things 
that others have. We can be quite content with 
little, provided that none of the neighbors has 
any more ; for indeed, we are at the top. That 
the top is low does not matter. This eternal 
rivalry arises out of aspects of our nature that 
are strong and deep. Envy and jealously are 
rooted deep in our inborn nature. If we are 
to have any mutual happiness in this life, envy 
and jealousy must be in large measure sup- 
pressed. 

A democracy should be saturated with a feel- 
ing of brotherhood. The longer one lives and 
reflects upon life, its deeper meanings and pur- 
poses, the stronger becomes one's belief in the 
essential unity of all things, particularly in the 
oneness of all mankind. In nature, everything 
fills its place. There is no great and no small. 
Our vision is too nearsighted. We see things out 



74 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

of proportion, out of perspective. A broader 
view enables us to see unity in the midst of va- 
riety, eacb tiling filling its place. And it is as 
important, in the general scheme of things, that 
a small place be filled as that a large one be fill- 
ed. The broader view enables us to see in every 
man, a mari. Nature puts some men under a 
handicap of body or of mind, or of both body 
and mind. All of us are subject to the accidents 
and circumstances of life, which are favorable 
to some, but unfavorable to others. As a re- 
sult, some of us have a rich experience, and are 
able to perform a life of service, full of achieve- 
ment. Others have a lowly existence, bare of 
vital experience, empty of achievement. Judged 
by ordinary standards, such men are very un- 
equal, but in each case, they are men; the life 
of one is as much the outcome of invariable and 
inflexible laws as is the other. Each is what he 
is, and under all the circumstances, could not 
have been otherwise. From this point of view, 
one is no more worthy of praise or blame than 
is the other. Truly, if we could choose which 
kind of life we would live, all would choose life 
rich in experience and full of achievement. But 
there are all degrees of both achievement and 
experience. He who, on account of nature and 
circumstances, can attain only a low level, suf- 



Ideals of Democracy. 75 

fers bitterness enough without having added 
the scorn or contempt or hatred or the lack 
of sympathy on the part of the more fortunate. 
We are alike in that we all suffer and rejoice; 
the same end awaits us all. In the grave the 
prince and the pauper sleep side by side. 

Whether or not we choose to consider all 
men our brothers, the welfare of each is much 
dependent upon the welfare of all the others. 
We are bound together by ties which we can- 
not break if we would. We are related by na- 
ture and bound together by the laws of life. If 
we would be happy, we must live a life of mu- 
tual helpfulness and sympathy. If we are to 
have social distinctions at all, they should be 
based on true w^orth, on real achievements, not 
en accidents of birth or superficial distinctions, 
least of all on money. We need to use a better 
criterion of values than is usually common. IH 
we had perfect and full social and economic 
justice, success in life would be a fair criterion 
of innate worth. If we were all trying to ac- 
cumulate worldly goods, then the amount ac- 
cumulated would be a measure of our relative 
worth. But we do not have social and economic 
justice and some of us are not trying to ac- 
cumulate wealth ; we have other aims and other 
values. An aristocracy of brains would be bet- 



76 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

ter than an aristocracy of money, but even an 
aristocracy of brains would be undesirable if it 
did not accept the principle of the brotherhood 
of man. 

Our democracy is afflicted with innumerable 
organizations, secret societies, clubs, cliques, and 
religious organizations. In a measure they are 
dangerous to democracy, dangerous because of 
a false sense of values. There is nothing wrong 
in being a Mason or a member of any one of the 
hundreds of similar organizations, but it is 
wrong to think that all virtue exists in our par- 
ti'^ular society or club. There is nothing wrong 
in being a Presbyterian, but it is wrong to think 
tiiHt all goodness is in the Presbyterian church 
and that Baptists and Methodists are on the road 
to perdition. Democracy must mean freedom. 
It must mean that we grant to all others the 
liberties which we claim for ourselves. When 
a stranger knocks at our door we should not 
ask whether he is a member of this club or that 
lodge or of a certain political party, but what 
manner of man he is. Good men are found ev- 
erywhere, in all kinds of organizations and out 
of them. So are bad men. A group of men 
come together, organize a society, call them- 
selves the elect, admit such others as they choose 



Ideals of Democracy. 77 

to admit. The virtue of the society is no higher 
than that of the men who compose it. 

It is also dangerous in a democracy to believe 
that good men are found only in certain pro- 
fessions or occupations. Since accidents, in a 
large measure, determine our vocations, it fol- 
lows that good men are found in all trades, pro- 
fessions, and occupations. The genius is found 
in the blacksmith shop, on the farm, in the 
factory, as well as in the bank and grocery 
store. The particular way in which one makes 
his living is a trivial matter. What kind of 
thoughts he thinks and what actions flow from 
his thoughts are the important matters. True 
worth should be our criterion, if we wish to 
measure one's station in life. 

In a democracy, the individual is the end. All 
other things are means. We praise a democracy 
because in a true democracy, there would be 
the fullest opportunity for individual achieve- 
ment and happiness. The highest possible de- 
velopment should be open to everyone. There 
should be no restrictions or barriers. Not only 
should the way be freely open, but society should 
provide for each one every possible opportunity 
and facility. Certainly each should receive the 
rewards of his labor. The individual is sacred. 
Society and every institution of society exists 



78 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

for him. But as a means, society and its insti- 
tutions are necessary. Individual life is incon- 
ceivable without them. 

If our democracy is properly to serve its high 
purpose, there must be a certain unity of feel- 
ing, aims, and ideals among us. There must be 
a certain solidarity and permanence. This can 
be achieved through education. It will come in 
part through a common literature, a common his- 
tory, through the development in every child of 
the highest ideals of democracy. Children in our 
schools must study the institutions of our coun- 
try, their development and their spirit. Love of 
country must become a sacred emotion. The 
young should study the lives and works of men 
who have been prominent factors in our national 
development. Why could we not have in the 
schools a course on Lincoln ? He did more than 
any other for our democracy and was the truest 
and highest embodiment of its spirit. Why 
could we not also have a course on Franklin? 
An intensive study of the lives and times of a 
few such men would do much toward develop- 
ing a true spirit of democracy in our young 
people. 

It must be evident that our largest hope for 
achieving a true democracy lies in the public 
schools. Here the children from every family. 



Ideals of Democracy. 79 

from all kinds of homes come together, and side 
by side are trained for the lives that lie before 
them. Here they play together and work to- 
gether. Here there should be absolutely no 
social distinction. Here true worth, real effi- 
ciency, and merit should receive their full recog- 
nition. Here every child, whether from the home 
of the banker, the blacksmith, the farmer, or 
from no home at all, should have the fullest op- 
portunity for development and preparation. In 
each child there should be developed the same 
love of country and its institutions ; in each, the 
same high social ideals. The state through the 
schools should help each child to live the high- 
est life possible. The schools should be a place 
for training in mutual social service and co- 
operation. Each child should be led to live the 
highest life that is possible for him, a life not 
centered wholly in self but including the lives 
of others. The school is a social institution 
whose function is to train the young for their 
lives in a democracy. 



CHAPTER VII 

IDEALS OF HOME AND CHILDREN. 

In the history of the world, the greatest thing 
that has ever been made by man is a home. Ot 
all his achievements, the home is the greatest, for 
on it civilization rests. Without the home, civ- 
ilization would sink back into the darkness and 
chaos of barbarism. From the home, man goes 
out each morning to his round of toil ; through 
the day he carries his burden; in the evening, 
he returns again to his home. About the home 
his life revolves. In it he finds the motive for 
his work; it is for the loved ones there that he 
toils. The heat of the summer sun beats down 
on him in vain ; the cold wind of the winter 
storm cannot blow too hard for him, for he has 
a home, and in that home are those whose lives 
are dearer to him than his own. 

The home furnishes the motive for man's 
work; it also provides the inspiration and com- 
fort which each day renew his strength and 
courage. Whatever the day may bring to him 
in pain or disappointment, the wife's welcome 
waits for him at night, and the baby's arms 

(80) 



Ideals of Home and Children. 81 

around his neck and its kiss upon his cheek 
will heal and comfort his sore heart, so that on 
the morrow he can go forth again. 

The tender est ties are those of the home ; the 
strongest bonds are those that bind us there. As 
the evening sun of our life nears its setting, and 
in retrospect we live our lives over again, of all 
the memories that come to us, the sweetest, the 
holiest, are those of childhood and its home. The 
vision of that home and its life stand out ever 
clear before us. It lives in our hearts. The 
house itself is a holy place ; its fireplace an al- 
tar where sv/eetest incense burnt; before its 
blazing hearth on long winter evenings we lived 
the earthly heaven of childhood. 

"Backward turn backvvard oh Time in your flight, 

Make me a child again just for tonight." 

Give me again my death mother's embrace; 

Kindle once more in the old fireplace 

The fire as it burned in the long ago, 

When the hills v/ere all covered with Christmas snow. 

Place in the circle around its blaze 

All who were dear to my youthful days. 

Give me again the joys that I knew 

In the home of my youth where hearts beat true. 

Civilization rests upon the home. If the home 
is in danger, civilization is in danger. There 
(6) 



82 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

are today social forces at work which will even- 
tually destroy the home if they are allowed to 
continue. In our consideration .of social influ- 
ences the first question which we should always 
ask is, what will be their effect on the home? 
The most dangerous of all such forces at present 
are those centering in the so called "emancipa- 
tion of women." When the woman goes out of 
the home there is no home left. A home without 
a woman is like a body without a heart, a solar 
system without a central sun. The mother is 
the magnet which holds together all the parts of 
the home. Take her out of the home, fill her life 
with outside interests, and at once the home dis- 
integrates, its m^embers fly apart. 

There are today too many outside interests 
which tend to weaken the influence of the home. 
The right kind of home should leave little room 
for other influences. Its amusements and the 
joys centering in the family life should bo by 
far the strongest of all the forces which affect 
the child. The home, in many places, has lost 
its function. Not only is most of the work out- 
side, but all its members go outside in search of 
excitement and amusement. The city bakery 
cooks our bread, the laundry cleans our clothes, 
the milkman brings our milk, the moving pic- 
ture show supplies the daily amusement. Dur- 



Ideals of Home and Children. 83 

ing the day the members of the family are ofteu 
at different places, engaged in different kinds of 
work; interests and attachments grow up out- 
side the family, whose members do not often see 
each other. The result is that family ties are 
weak. The true home disappears; there is left 
a house where people meet for the night to 
sleep. 

A home will not make itself. It is made by 
the united efforts of man and woman. The man 
provides the material part, the house, the food, 
the clothes ; but his duty does not end here. The 
whole work of the management of the home and 
the rearing of the children should be planned 
and directed by both father and mother. How- 
ever, the larger burden of making the home must 
fall to the mother. The education of every girl 
should include a training that will fit her for 
making a home; a training in the science and 
art of cooking, in sewing, in sanitation and hy- 
giene, in nursing, and in all that science can 
teach her concerning the nature of children. 
Children go to school, but the greater part of 
their education should come from the mother; 
for this work, she must be prepared. She must 
learn how to beautify the home, how to make it 
a place where children and father will like to 
be. She should be skilled in music : she should 



84 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

know books and be a good reader; she should 
know stories and how to tell them. The whole 
spiritual life of the children is in her keeping; 
if she fails, the family life fails. This prepara- 
tion is her professional training, corresponding 
to the husband's professional training. This 
Avork will occupy all the mother's time. She 
should have no outside interests except in prob- 
lems that bear on the home and its life. She 
should realize that her profession is the great- 
est of all professions ; on her shoulders she car- 
ries the burden of civilization ; she is the maker 
of home, the maker of men. 

There cannot be much of a home without chil- 
dren. The state maintains public schools for the 
training of children ; and while the training of 
the schools is important, it cannot compare with 
the influence of the home. The school originated 
as a supplement to home-training ; it can never 
be more. This is especially true in the field of 
morals. Ideals of work, of truth, of honesty, of 
patience and perseverence, of duty, and of re- 
sponsibility must come from the home. The 
teacher is the mother's helper. They should 
work in the closest co-operation, and mutual un- 
derstanding. 

The mother should plan for the daily life of 
her children ; for their work and their play. She 



Ideals of Home and Childken. 85 

should know where her children are and what 
they are doing. She should especially know and 
understand what the}^ do at school. She should 
plan for their evenings, for their Saturdays and 
Sundays. One serious difficulty in the rearing 
of children is the difference in ideals between 
family and family as to the manner in which 
children should be reared. In some homes the 
children are given the greatest of care, and great 
pains are taken b}^ the parents to develop in 
their children proper ideals and habits of con- 
duct. And it may be that in homes nearby such 
pains and care are not taken ; the parents them- 
selves may hold quite different ideals of con- 
duct. In one home the children may be allowed 
great freedom, may go wherever they please 
and when they please; some are allowed to 
fight; some are allowed to go to parties and 
dances at night, others are not. These great 
differences in ideals and procedure make it dif- 
ficult for parents to follow out their own ideals 
in training their children. This difficulty can 
be overcome, at least in part, by the common 
training which girls should receive in school, 
and by neighborhood co-operation. If a group 
of people engage in any common enterprise they 
study their problems and come to some unity of 
purpose and of plans for the accomplishment of 



86 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

their purposes. They must follow a similar 
course in the rearing of children. There must 
be considerable unity of ideals and of practice 
before individuals can live a common life as citi- 
zens of the same state and country. We must 
not destroy individualism, but there should not 
be two opinions in fundamental matters of mor- 
als. All children should receive the same train- 
ing in matters of truth, honesty, integrity, in- 
dustry, perseverance, sympathy, and civic spirit. 
To bring this about there must be complete un- 
derstanding and agreement as well as the full- 
est co-operation among the homes. The place 
for these conferences in child-training should be 
the school house. There, parents should meet 
often, formally and informally, to talk over 
their common work, the making of men and wo- 
men out of boys and girls. The school is their 
school and should be so conducted as to give 
them most help in the work of rearing and train- 
ing their children. 

The world today is in a state of ferment, of 
unrest and disorder. Everywhere men are 
searching for a plan of reconstruction, for some 
panacea that will cure social and political evils. 
The cure will be found only in the home and 
its teaching. Let us have homes founded on 
mutual affection and sympathy; in these homes, 



Ideals of Home and Children. 37 

let us train children in those virtues on which 
good citizenship must always rest. "We cannot 
cure any serious social evils by the mere pas- 
sage of laws; they can only be cured by mak- 
ing right the hearts of men; and the hearts of 
men will be made right only to the extent that 
the home and the influences auxilliary to the 
home succeed. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

IDEALS OF ART AND BEAUTY. 

This is called an age of materialism. The 
last century has witnessed a material progress 
unparalleled in history. No thousand years be- 
fore had seen man make such progress in re- 
ducing the forces of nature to his control. Ev- 
ery school boy is familiar with this progress. 
Electricity and steam have given us the 
telephone, the telegraph, electric motor, and 
the steam engine with all its manifold uses for 
power. We have seen the steamboat, the loco- 
motive, and various machines such as the reaper, 
the threshing machine, the sewing machine, the 

cotton gin, the cream separator, the linotype, the 
automobile, one after another, take their indis- 
pensible places in our industries. In every 
town there is a factory. We have gone down 
into the earth for coal and metals, oil and gas ; 
we have torn down the very mountains them- 
selves. We have made nature give up her se- 
crets. We know of the X-rays, the Hertzian 
waves and radium. We have weighed the atom, 
and measured the velocity of light. We sail 

(88) 



Ideals of Art and Beauty. 89 

under the sea or in the air above at will. The 
railroads thread their endless ways through the- 
country hauling the coal and minerals from tlie 
mines, produce and grain from the farms, and 
distributing the factory products of the cities 
far and wide throughout the land. Everywhere 
is the ceaseless hum of industry. But what of 
art? Has it made such progress? The energy 
of man is limited. During the last hundred 
years, that energy in America has been expend- 
ed in reducing the forces of nature to the uses 
of man. The genius of our country has been 
building railroads and mills instead of writing 
poems and painting pictures. We boast of this 
great material progress, but we may well ask 
whether it profits man to harness all the forces 
of nature and remain the same man he was be- 
fore. Have we reduced human misery? Have 
we increased human happiness? Have we gain- 
ed in kindness and sympathy ? Do v/e use our 
immense power to make the environment of man 

more beautiful? What does it profit us to ride 
over country roads at the rate of thirty miles 

an hour and over the railroads at the rate oi 

sixty miles an hour if our homes are no happier 

than they used to be ? 

The great poems were written long ago, also 

the dramas, the epics, the novels. The great 



90 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

paintings were painted years ago. We speak 
of Plato, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Dante, Angelo, 
and Phidias. These men lived centuries ago. 
They never talked over a telephone or rode in 
a car, never received a wireless, although they 
seemed to receive spiritual messages from the 
gods. The plain and simple fact is that the 
happiness and higher spiritual life of man are 
largely independent of material things. It 
sometimes seems as if material success actually 
blunts the higher nature of man and makes him 
less sympathetic, less sensitive to the finer in- 
fluences that surround him. 

The knowledge, skill, and power that man 
now has, make it possible for him to beautify the 
face of the earth. We should begin with the 
home. Every family should live in a beautiful 
home. Society should not allow any family to 
live in an ugly, ill-constructed house. The house 
should have a yard with trees, shrubs, and flow- 
ers. Human life cannot flourish in the crowded 
tenements, and unspeakable hovels of the large 
cities. Inside, the house should be a cozy and 
pretty nest for happy people to live in. Every- 
thing in its should be good, substantial, beautiful 
— the rugs, the furniture, the pictures. We 
should train a race of people who will not be 
satisfied with anything cheap and poor and ugly. 



Ideals of Art and Beauty. 91 

Let us walk on the bare floors of our rooms un- 
til we can put beautiful rugs on them. Let us 
look at the clean, blank walls until we can hang 
on them a picture that is a real picture, one that 
will be a joy to look at and study as long as it 
hangs there, a picture that will enter into our 
lives and become a part of us, a picture in which 
some true artist has embodied a bit of the beau- 
tiful. If we can have only a print, a copy, let 
it be of a really great picture. 

The same ideal should extend to everything in 
the home and in our lives, even to the dishes 
and the table and the cooking, but on this sub- 
ject, let us hear Ruskin: '^ Learn first thor- 
oughly the economy of the kitchen; the good 
and bad qualities of every common article of 
food, and the simplest and best modes of their 
preparation; when you have time, go and help 
in the cooking of poor families and show them 
how to make as much of everything as possible, 
and how to make little, nice ; coaxing and tempt- 
ing them into tidy and pretty ways, and plead- 
ing for well-folded table-clothes, however coarse, 
^nd for a flower or two out of the garden to 
strew on them. If you manage to get a clean 
table-cloth, bright plates on it, and a good 
dish in the middle, of your own cooking, you 
may ask leave to say a short grace, and let your 



92 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

religiaus ministries be confined to that much for 
the present." 

The books on our table and in our book- 
ease should be well bound, on good paper, well 
printed, — books that are worth reading more 
than once, and worth keeping. The books we 
like, our favorites, — we save up money so that 
we can buy them, one by one, in the best and 
most substantial bindings; we treasure them 
and keep them as long as we live. The^^ too, 
like the good pictures, become part of our lives. 
We go to them daily for joy, consolation, and 
comfort. 

Even our clothes should be the best we can 
possibly afford. It is true that clothes do not 
make the man; and we should never judge a 
man by what is on his body but rather by what 
is in his head. Nevertheless, we should have 
an ideal of possessing only what is good, what 
is suited for its purpose and function, and this 
ideal should include our clothes. Of course, we 
should have a sense of relative values. If we 
must decide between a book or a picture and 
a new suit of clothes, we should let the clothes 
wait if that is possible. While we should try 
to have beautiful houses, good and if possible, 
beautiful clothes, it should not be to excel our 
neighbors, but because we like good and beauti- 
ful things. 



Ideals of Art and Beauty. 93 

Into the possessions of ours with which wc 
surround ourselves, we should put our individ- 
uality. Our soul, our conception of what is 
beautiful should be embodied in all we make or 
have; and we should not forget that the first 
element of beauty is that of fittingness, the ap- 
propriateness of the thing to fulfill its function. 
Lasting beauty cannot be a veneer. The mast 
beautiful chair is a substantial chair made to 
sit in; one that gives us such comfort during 
the evening as we sit in it and read our favorite 
author that it is a pleasant memory through the 
day. The most beautiful house is the one best 
suited to the life and work of the people who 
live in it. The effect that substantial and beauti- 
ful things have on the lives of people cannot be 
overestimated. Our life is a unity. If we live 
in cheap houses, eat poor food in a dirty kitchen, 
read poor and ugly books, work with poor 
tools, our life will be low and our work, poor. We 
think more of ourselves if we are clean, and if 
our dress is good and suited to the work which 
v/e are doing. But let us not mistake or mis- 
understand the facts. It is more important that 
the soul be clean even though the body be 
clothed in rags. As betvreen the beautiful and 
the good, we should choose the good. It is 
doubtful, however, that such a choice ever has 



94 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

to be made. The beauty that abides is in the 
good, the thing that does what it is meant to do, 
that fills its place. We should be able to dis- 
tinguish the superficially beautiful, the ephemer- 
ally beautiful, from the permanently beautiful. 
If one should travel over the country, viewing 
the various works of man, among the ugliest 
things he would see are the school houses, par- 
ticularly those of the country and small towns. 
The main principle that seems to be followed in 
their construction is a mathematical one, namely, 
the relation of maximum volume to minimum of 
inclosing surface. Some sacrifice to this princi- 
ple is made in making the houses a little longer 
than wide. It is common to see in the country 
a school house and grounds so ugly, so desolate, 
so forlorn, that even the pigs and wild animals 
seem to avoid them. It should be unlawful to 
build in any district a school house that is not 
as good and as beautiful and as well furnished 
as the best dwelling in the district. The house 
should be built on the most beautiful location 
that is at all central, one if possible containing 
some large forest trees, for it takes a generation 
to grow a tree. The school grounds should con- 
tain several acres. The services of a competent 
architect should be secured in planning the 
house, and those of a landscape gardener in 



Ideals of Art and Beauty. 95 

laying off the grounds for the trees and shrubs 
and flower beds. The house and grounds should 
be the pride of the community. Nothing cheap 
or tawdry or ephemeral should find a place there. 
Public spirit should be such that a boy would 
rather cut his Sunday coat than a school desk 
or the bark on a school-yard tree. If the people 
are not able to have good furniture or pictures 
in their homes, they should at least have them 
in their school house, for all the children go 
there. What they are not able to buy individ- 
ually for themselves, they can buy collectively 
for their common children. Everything in the 

school house should be the best that money can 
buy — books, maps, pictures, wallpaper, black- 
boards. 

The grounds should include a large lawn, with 
beautiful and diversified shrubs and trees and 
flowers, v/holl}^ apart from the playground. The 
house, even in a country district, should have 
several rooms, and a basement under the whole 
house, and a good furnace. One room, even 
though small, should be for a library and mu- 
seum. This room cannot be filled in a day, but 

as the years go by, the books, the collections, the 
pictures, can be added to, until eventually they 
will become priceless in value to the community. 
Why should we go to all the expense neces- 
sary to make such a school as we have pictured? 



96 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

Because it will pay. It will pay in better boys 
and girls; better men and women. In having 
only the best, only what is beautiful, at school, 
higher ideals of worth and beauty can be de- 
veloped in the children. These ideals will have 
their effect on the homes and therefore raise the 
aesthetic and ethical life of the community. The 
beautiful school should simply be one of the 
means used to develop beautiful lives and bring 
a higher happiness to all the members of the 
community. 

But can we have these things? Are they pos- 
sible ? Yes, if we want them. The money raised 
by this country for carrying on the Great 
War would be enough to put an ideal school 
house in every district in the land and to fur- 
nish each in the best of taste. Let us declare 
war on ignorance and poverty and sin and ugli- 
ness, and raise money by the billions for the 
prosecution of this war, else the other war shall 
have been won in vain. 

Making the world beautiful must be largely 
the work of women, at least in plan and con- 
ception. In our common life together, what 
men shall do and what women shall do is merely 
a matter of the division of labor. In the very 
nature of things, the woman must be the home 
maker, and therefore the home beautifier. Her 



Ideals of Art and Beauty. 97 

first duty is to beautify it by herself, by giving 
her life to it, by earnestly taking up its duties 
and responsibilities, and embracing its oppor- 
tunities. She should strive to have a home beauti- 
ful in every particular. In its material aspects 
the home should be pretty, the house, the yard, 
the garden. But more important still is the 
spiritual side of the home. Circumstances may 
limit the woman's power to make the home 
beautiful materially, but they need never limit 
her possibilities on the spiritual side. To be 
clean, to be neat, to wear a smile are not expen- 
sive. The humblest sort of home materially can 
be made radiantl^^ beautiful by a woman. 



CHAPTER IX. 

IDEALS OF MORALS AND RELIGION. 

Of all the factors that influence the life of 
man, bringing him sorrow and joy, by far the 
most important are his relations with his fel- 
lows. Our stronger emotions, love, hate, envy, 
jealousy, grief, sorrow, joy are excited chiefly by 
other men. The influence of nature and art and 
books may be strong but are not to be compared 
to the influences of our fellows. A human life by 
itself is incomplete; it demands the lives of 
others. We can get inspiration from a book, we 
can get courage from it. The mountains, the 
rivers, the shady woods in summer, or the snow 
covered woods in winter, may give us joy, but 
what is like the touch of a friendly hand ? What 
is like a mother 's love ? On the other hand, what 
crushes the human heart as does the unkindness, 
the scorn, the contempt, the injustice of others? 
What is so terrible as a mother's pain from the 
injustice and ingratitude of her child? Our life 
is through and through a social life. We are all 
bound together by a thousand ties which we 
could not break if we would. In this common 
life together, certain types of action bring pain, 

(98) 



Ideals of Morals and Religion, 99 

sorrow and sadness ; other types of action bring 
well-being, happiness and contentment. As the 
ages have gone by, society has put its approval 
upon these types of action which experience has 
shown to be for the highest happiness of man; 
it has put its disapproval on those types which 
experience has shown to be detrimental to man 's 
highest good. Racial experience has given us 
our social standards of morality. These stand- 
ards are an evolution ; they have changed some- 
what from one age to another. The changes, 
however, for the last two or three thousand 
years, have been for the most part, in non- 
essentials and unimportant details. Th^ funda- 
mental bases of character as held by thinking 
men have remained much the same, through- 
out the ages since we have had historic records. 
The oldest moral teachings in our Bible are 
largely the same as the best teaching of 
today. A few changes only have been funda- 
mental. For example, Jesus said, ''It hath 
been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for 
a tooth : But I say unto you, That ye resist not 
evil.^' 

Man has been here a long time ; how long, no 
one knows. For hundreds of centuries he has 
been slowly making his upward way, from the 
brute to the savage, from savage to man. Thou- 
sands of years ago he lifted up his hands and 



100 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

his head. His fight with the elements and the 
wild animals was a long fight. Man's road has 
been strewn with blood. Our ancestors, brute 
and savage, have been travelling this bloody road 
for perhaps millions of years. Civilization is 
but a matter of today and yesterday. The heri- 
tage w^e carried out of the woods is akin to the 
nature of the tiger. It is bred deep in our very 
nerves and flesh and bones. Most of our failures 
in the world of morals are due to the fact that 
we do not take proper account of the age and 
strength of innate human nature. This nature 
cannot be transformed over night. It is not 
changed by a person's learning a few moral and 
religious maxims. It can be changed only by 
our building up a new nature based on habit, a 
building that in the case of each individual re- 
quires some twenty years of the hardest kind of 
work on the part of parents and teachers. And 
the building must be erected on original human 
nature. Underneath there always smoulder the 
fires of the original man who was our father in 
the woods. Under favorable circumstances, we 
keep down this smouldering fire, but at any 
moment it may break forth. Every day some- 
where we see its blaze in angry flashing eyes, or 
in the scorn of an upturned lip, or in a cutting 
word, or perchance in the blow of a human hand. 



Ideals of Morals and Religion, 101 

As the centuries have gone by man has learned 
many things. He has learned that if he is to 
live with his fellows in any degree of content- 
ment and happiness, he and they must observe 
certain rules of action, the most important hav- 
ing reference to truth, honesty, industry, sympa- 
thy and civic spirit. Out of the crucible of hu- 
man experience have come five principles, tried 
and tested through thousands of years — five 
principles so essential to human happiness that 
they are not only the basis of morality but of 
religion as well, in so far as religion affects mor- 
ality. 

In our communication, we must be truthful; 
in our dealings, we must be honest. There can 
be no harmonious relations without these two 
virtues. This we have known from the time of 
Solomon, and much longer ; but how far we are 
from living up to a high conception of these vir- 
tues! The strongest efforts of the home and 
school should be exerted to develop in children 
truth and honesty. So necessary are they to our 
social and individual well-being that they should 
be ever held before the child as among the 
highest goals of human ambition. 

All should work. He who does not produce as 
much as he consumes is a thief, he lives on the 
labor of others. If each would do his proper 



102 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

share of work, it would lighten the labor of all. 
To be an idler is a sin because it increases the 
burden of all. 

Civic spirit is necessary because of our com- 
mon life in society. The institutional machinery 
of society and government is -immense. Each 
of us must do his part, and must always have 
the proper attitude toward the social work. Roads 
and streets must be built and kept up. Law^s 
must be made and administered. They do not 
make themselves nor administer themselves. They 
are our lecws ; we make them. Making the world 
a better world is our work, the mutual work of 
all. He that will not do his part of the com- 
mon work of society is a sinner; he is holding 
back instead of pulling ahead. 

In sympathy, we find the heart and core of 
the Christian religion, the central teaching of 
Jesus. We can work, tell the truth, and be 
honest, but unless we love our brother, the world 
is still a cold and bare world. The greatest 
force in the world is love. It is human affec- 
tion that binds the family together, gives us 
strength and courage for our daily toil, and 
inspiration for our highest efforts. As the poet 
puts it: 



Ideals of Morals and Religion, 103 

"It is the heart and not the brain, 
That to the highest doth attain; 
And he who followeth love's behest, 
Far excelleth all the rest." 

Truth, honesty, industry, civic spirit, and 
sympathy are the cardinal virtues on which 
civilization stands. There can be no satisfac- 
tory social life without them. The civilization 
of any time is high or lovv according as the people 
stand high or low in their practice of these vir- 
tues. Our ideals of these virtaes should con- 
stitute our standards, our criteria, which we 
should apply to all proposals for social reform, 
to all social movements that are likely to bear 
on morality. We should always ask : Will this 
thing make for or against the fundamental vir- 
tues? If the thing proposed will undermine 
either of them, to the same extent it will under- 
mine one of the necessarj^ conditions of civilized 
life. Without truth and honesty, social and 
business life is chaos; without industry on the 
part of all, injustice is put upon some ; unless 
all have proper civic spirit — unless all carry 
their proper share of the common burdens — in- 
justice is done to some and social progress is 
retarded; and without a real and genuine sym- 
pathy, a happy social life is impossible. 



104 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

So fundamental are these corner stones of 
character and morality that they should be ever 
held as the highest aims of teaching. They 
should stand as primary, as taking precedence 
over all other things. We should hold these vir- 
tues in such high esteem that we should con- 
sider all other characteristics or possessions as 
worthless without them. Althought these vir- 
tues are merely means to an end — the end being 
a happy social life — they are such absolute and 
necessary conditions of all decent and worthy 
life, we should hold them and strive after them 
as if they were really ends in themselves, be- 
cause nothing worth having comes without them. 
The whole experience of man bears testimony to 
the fact that they are the sine qua non of all 
desirable social existence. 

In our religion w^e have been too much con- 
cerned about the hereafter, and not enough 
about the present life. We have been too much 
concerned about the beliefs and doctrines and 
not enough about practice. We want a religion 
for this life and this world. It was such a relig- 
ion that Jesus taught, but it has been so per- 
verted that he would not recognize it in some of 
its present forms. If He should appear among 
us today and attend some aristocratic church, an 



Ideals of Morals and Religion, 105 

usher would seat Him in some obscure corner, if 
indeed he would give Him a seat at all. 

What humanity needs more than anything 
else, is kind hearts and a real and genuine feel- 
ing of brotherhood. No one cares for pity; no 
one cares for maudlin sympathy, nor sympathy 
that is condescension. What all do care for is 
the genuine love of a sincere heart. The world 
needs no new religion; it needs to live its old 
religion. It is a travesty to the Christian re- 
ligion for a woman wearing a fifty-dollar hat 
and a hundred dollar dress to go to church to 
worship while some of her neighbors are suf- 
fering for want of clothes or food. She prays 
in the name of Jesus, but Jesus did not put 
his approval on such practices. If we could 
have social and economic justice, most of the 
misery of the world would disappear; kindness 
and sympathy would lessen the remaining mis- 
ery. 

Let the schools teach the true religion of 
Jesus, the religion of love; let them teach thar 
each man is our brother; let them teach that 
whatever distinctions we make among men 
should be based on real worth, not on surface 
indications; let them condemn idleness, insin- 
cerity, and unkindness ; and glorify work, truth, 
and sympathy. 



106 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

Morality and religion are really two different 
things. Morality grows out of man's relation 
to his fellows; religion, out of his relation to 
God. Religion is of practical significance only 
in so far as it affects man 's life here. To the ex- 
tent that one's belief in God, or in life here- 
after affects his actions and his dealings with his 
fellow man, his religion is identical with morali- 
ty. But there is no necessaiy connection be- 
tween religious beliefs and moral actions. One 
can believe that there is a God and that the 
human soul is immortal and be either a good man 
01 a bad man. On the other hand, one can be- 
lieve that there is no God and that the human 
soul is mortal, and he be either a good man or 
a bad man. The belief itself, no matter what it 
is, makes one neither good nor bad. Religion is 
effective in our lives if we believe there is a 
God who wishes us to do right, and because of 
this belief, we do right. It is also effective if 
we believe in rewards and punishments after 
death — heaven hereafter for those who are good 
here, and hell for those who are bad — and be- 
cause of this belief we do good here in order to 
escape the punishments of hell and receive the 
rewards of heaven. It is evident, therefore, that 
religion is of practical value for this life to the 
extent that it affects our actions here. 



Ideals of Morals and Religion, 107 

The experience of men through the ages 
teaches us that this life is hardly worth the 
li\dng unless we are kind and just. In all our 
dealings and associations with our fellows we 
must, in a measure, identify their interests with 
ours. If our neighbor is in trouble or in pain, 
we must relieve him if we can ; if he is in need, 
we should give him such help as is in our power. 
We should not only try to make a living for our- 
selves, but should work for the common good, for 
better things, a better life for all. Precisely this 
was the teaching of Jesus, and such a doctrine 
is the basis of the ethical principles of the Chris- 
tian religion. 

This teaching is very simple and it is very 
clear. Its soundness is founded not only on the 
life and example of Jesus, but on those of other 
great moral and religious teachers, and on the 
experience of man. It need not be clouded by 
theological dogma, superstition, or tradition. It 
is the moral and religious voice of the ages. It 
carries the weight and authority of the good 
men of all races and of all times. 

It is a great pity that the religious forces of 
the world should be divided. The essential moral 
principles embodied in all religions are included 
in the Golden Rule: Do unto others as yoa 
would have them do to you. There is little room 



108 The Teacher's Ideals of Life. 

for difference of opinion here. All men can ac- 
cept this doctrine — a doctrine so simple that it 
can be taught to children. But it must be re- 
membered that no teaching is effective except 
as it is incorporated into our practice. The mere 
acceptance of a doctrine will not make us good. 
Herein lies one of the causes of failure in the 
work of some religious teachers; they too often 
emphasize mere belief. An ideal held on Sun- 
day is of no value unless it enters into the actual 
life of Monday. 

We should have a high conception of the sa- 
credness and sanctity, as well as the possibilities, 
of all human life. We should hold to no narrow 
creed and to no restricted brotherhood. Ulti- 
mately the fate of all humanity is bound up to- 
gether. Lincoln said that this nation could not 
endure half slave and half free. In much the 
same sense, we may now say that the world can 
not exist half slave and half free. The dis- 
coveries and inventions of the last century have 
brought us all together, and made us neighbors 
in a truer sense than was ever the case before. 
The peoples of all other lands are now our close 
neighbors. Whatever may be their fate, is ulti- 
mately ours ; what is ours, is also theirs. As long 
as any considerable group of people have low 



Ideals of Morals and Religion, 109 

ideals and customs of life, are hampered by 
superstition, tradition, and ignorance, we are all 
in danger. It must be our high ideal to free the 
mind of every man whose life is shackled by 
bonds that keep him from the truth and from 
the highest things that are possible for him. But 
let us not forget that while knowledge makes us 
free, freedom has its responsibilities. The more 
we know, the clearer we see the truth, the greater 
is our responsibility, not only in making our own 
lives harmonize with the clearer vision, but in 
helping others to live the highest life possible to 
them. 



